Amir Alishahitabriz
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA
Title: Relation of intelligence quotient and body mass index in Iranian children: A community-based cross-sectional study
Biography
Biography: Amir Alishahitabriz
Abstract
Overweight and obesity in the children is a global problem. Besides physical effects, obesity has harmful psychological effects on children. We conducted a cross-sectional community-based study to investigate the relationship of Body Mass Index (BMI) with cognitive functioning in preschool children. Thirteen socioeconomically elements of 1151 children was measured and analyzed based on their intelligence quantities (IQ) test results. Thirteen out of 33 provinces were selected randomly and schools selected as the clusters in rural and urban areas. Descriptive statistics, t-test, ANOVA and regression were used when appropriate. Our analysis showed that IQ was associated with, Household income, Place of Residence, Previous, Delivery Type, Infant Feeding, Father’s educational level and Mother’s educational level (P < 0.001 for all). With using penalized linear regression for eliminating the impact of confounding factor, our study shows, living in Metropolitan (β = 2.411) and urban area (β = 2.761), level of participants’ fathers education (β = 5.251) was positively and BMI (β = -0.594) was negatively related with IQ test results. The findings of present study showed that a lower IQ score is associated with higher BMI. Although this relation appears to be largely mediated when socioeconomic, status considered.