%0 Journal Article
%T Health state preferences associated with weight status in children and adolescents
%A Mandy B Belfort
%A John AF Zupancic
%A Katherine M Riera
%A Jane HG Turner
%A Lisa A Prosser
%J BMC Pediatrics
%D 2011
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1471-2431-11-12
%X We enrolled 76 children 5-18 years of age from a primary care clinic and an obesity clinic in Boston MA. We administered the Health Utilities Index (HUI) and used the HUI Mark 3 single- and multi-attribute utility functions to calculate health utilities. We determined BMI percentile and weight status based on CDC references. We examined single-attribute and overall utilities in relation to weight status and BMI.Mean (range) age was 10.8 (5-18) years. Mean (SD) BMI percentile was 76 (26); 55% of children were overweight or obese. The mean (SD) overall utility was 0.79 (0.17) in the entire sample. For healthy-weight children, the mean overall utility was higher than for overweight or obese children (0.81 vs. 0.78), but the difference was not statistically significant (difference 0.04, 95% CI -0.04, 0.11).Our results provide a quantitative estimate of the health utility associated with overweight and obesity in children, and will be helpful to researchers performing cost effectiveness analyses of interventions to prevent and/or treat childhood obesity.Childhood obesity is a substantial and growing public health problem [1] and numerous interventions for its treatment and prevention have been developed [2,3]. In deciding which interventions are most efficient, cost-effectiveness analysis can be used to compare the intervention-associated costs with the benefits, including improvements in health status [4]. Previous research has demonstrated that in children and adolescents, higher body mass index (BMI) is associated with lower health related quality of life (HRQOL) [5-9], suggesting that preventing or treating obesity would improve children's HRQOL. While the HRQOL measures used in those studies are useful for describing health status, they are not applicable to cost-effectiveness analysis because they do not reflect the value attached to the health status, either by the participants or by society.One well-accepted economic method for quantifying people's value for heal
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2431/11/12