摘要：Childhood obesity is a major health concern. The associatedhealth risks dramatically reduce lifespan and increase healthcare costs. Thegoal was to develop methodology to identify as early in life as possiblewhether or not a child would become obese at age ve. This diagnostictool would facilitate clinical monitoring to prevent and or minimize obesity.Obesity is measured by Body Mass Index (BMI), but an improved metric,the ratio of weight to height (or length) (WOH), is proposed from this researchfor detecting early obesity. Results of this research demonstrate thatWOH performs better than BMI for early detection of obesity in individualsusing a longitudinal decision analysis (LDA), which is essentially an individualstype control chart analysis about a trend line. Utilizing LDA, theodds of obesity of a child at age ve is indicated before the second birthdaywith 95% sensitivity and 97% speci city. Further, obesity at age ve isindicated with 75% speci city before two months and with 84% speci citybefore three months of age. These results warrant expanding this study tolarger cohorts of normal, overweight, and obese children at age ve fromdi erent healthcare facilities to test the applicability of this novel diagnostictool.
