Estado nutricional de preescolares asistentes a la Junta Nacional de Jardines Infantiles de Chile: Evaluación de la concordancia entre indicadores antropométricos de obesidad y obesidad central

historically, the anthropometric assessment of nutritional welfare programs has been targeted to assess nutritional deficiencies based on weight-to-age and height-to-age indicators. recently, given the increase on childhood obesity, it has been also recommended the measurement of indicators of obesity (i.e. weight-to-height) and central obesity (i.e. waist circumference). however, the agreement of these indicators in preschool children is unclear. the aims of this study were: 1) assess the nutritional status of children attending the chilean national nursery schools council program (junji); 2) assess the agreement between general and central obesity anthropometric measurements in these children. in 574 girls and 580 boys, 3.0 to 5.9 years old, we measured: weight, height, waist and hip circumference, and five skinfolds. we used the who 2006 growth standards to estimate z-scores. we defined general obesity as whz or baz= 2, and central obesity as waist circumference ≥ 90 percentile of nhanes iii. the participants were on average slightly shorter but considerably heavier and obese than the reference populations. prevalence of general obesity was close to 16% with both indicators while prevalence of central obesity reached 15%. there was good agreement among general obesity indicators and central obesity indicators (kappa = 0.6-0.7). in summary, we found a high prevalence of obesity and central obesity among chilean preschool children beneficiaries of a welfare program. at this age, there was a good agreement among general obesity indicators and central obesity indicators. these results suggest that waist circumferences measurements should not be incorporated to the program.