Question

2. You have access to school health records for a small country. Data on students’ BMI is collected once, at the end of 2018. You are interested in prevalence of overweight and obesity at the different school levels.

e. What is the prevalence of overweight or obesity in high school students?

f. What proportion of normal weight children is in middle school?

g. Create a frequency and relative frequency table for the weight status of elementary school students.

h. Calculate a 95% confidence interval for each relative frequency you found in g.

i. Create the appropriate graph to display the information you found in g.

Answer 1

1) prevalence of obesity among children and adolescents in the United States increased from 10.6% to 13.9. Obesity can lead to serious adverse consequences such as asthma, obstructive sleep apnea, joint problems, hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, low self-esteem, and depression.

2) nearly 40% of children started kindergarten with a BMI in the top quartile of the growth charts (BMI > 75th percentile). This proportion increased significantly during the elementary school years, and the largest gains were between 1st and 3rd grades but there was no further increase during middle school. Increases in BMI percentiles over time were most notable among Hispanic children and black girls.