Health Research Methods - Essay Example

In youth, physical inactivity has been identified as an important predictor of excess weight gain. Concurrent with increases in overweight and obesity, physical activity has decreased among children and adolescents. During middle and high school years, marked declines in physical activity have been observed, particularly among girls, regardless of race. One reason for the decline in physical activity in the childhood may be the reduction of physical education in schools. In the developed world, increasing use of computers and television also markedly decrease children's activity level.

As a result of this, while many children get little to no physical activity, even those who meet current recommended activity guidelines may still not be exercising sufficiently (Ebbelling, Pawlak, and Ludwig, 2002, 473-482). The degree of obesity in children cannot be assessed by any classification as it is done in case of adults. In case of children, it is expressed traditionally by percentile measures. Children who have a body mass index (BMI) between 85th and 95th percentile are considered at risk for overweight, and those who are at greater than 95th percentile are considered overweight. . as been elucidated that worldwide, there has been a trend towards increasing prevalence of overweight and obesity in children, and this could lead to a increased predisposition to metabolic syndrome and related complications.

Overweight children more often become overweight adults, and as increases, this poses serious risk for health (Freedman et al., 2004, 10-16). Obesity has been known to be associated with and sometimes causative of serious medical complications in the adult life, which can be sequelae of the childhood obesity. Moreover, serious medical complications of obesity may lead to enhanced mortality in children (Lobstein and Frelut, 2003, 195-200). Therefore monitoring the prevalence and preventing them childhood becomes an important question.

Since prevention has been recognised to be the best form of intervention in obesity in childhood, it is important to find out the risk factors that may be associated with childhood obesity. Current evidence from existing research suggests that primary or idiopathic obesity in children has been linked with nutritional factors right from the formula feeding to caloric intake, nutritional balance, food groups, physical activity, and many other factors (Cuttler, Whittaker, and Kodish, 2003, 722-724).

Therefore interventions in these areas to curb the risk factors would be able to improve the obesity status of the children in the community. Research Question: Based on this hypothesis, an appropriate study can be designed that can investigate the effects on risk factor interventions in obese children in order to answer the question can risk factor modification interventions be effective in reducing obesity in a study population comprising of children Aims: To investigate the short-term and long-term effects of risk factor