A Systematic Review on the Prevalence of Overweight and Obesity, in Iranian Children and Adolescents

CONTEXT: Obesity has now become a common health problem worldwide. To gain insight into the epidemiology of the problem in Iran, we systematically reviewed all available studies on the prevalence of overweight and obesity in the Iranian pediatric population. EVIDENCE ACQUISITION: We systematically searched PubMed, ISI, SCOPUS, as well as Iranmedex, Irandoc, and Scientific Information Database (SID) databases.All studies on mean and standard deviation or percentile categories of BMI, WC, WHR, or WHtR or prevalence of obesity/overweight in Iranian child and adolescence, were performed from January 1990 to the end of December 2013. Refining processes were conducted by two independent reviewers. Quality assessment and data extraction followed based on validated form. As, these data were heterogeneous, meta-analysis was not performed. RESULTS: From 3253 records, through three refining steps, 129 articles were found related to our study. In Iran, national studies are limited and nearly there is no comprehensive study for sub-national trends. Different age and sex groups had large variations in the prevalence of obesity and overweight (from 1% up to 16.1% and from 4.4% up to 42.3% respectively for obesity and overweight). CONCLUSIONS: Related data are very scattered or limited to some specific subgroups in some living areas. For comparing, aggregating, and imputing the information we need more modern practical statistical methods.