Regular monitoring of children’s nutritional status is essential to prevent micronutrient deficiencies, nutritional status abnormalities as stunting, wasting, overweight and obesity. Nutritional status assessment is usually performed by paediatricians by using anthropometry (body mass index, weight to height indices) and/or by body fat-mass measurement (bioimpedance analysis, dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry, computer tomography, etc.). Parents are also interested in but usually fail to evaluate their child’s nutritional status. To help the sufficient collaboration between the physician and parents a new nutritional status monitoring method is developed for families. The new monitoring system was developed under a paediatrician’s supervision by considering national and international recommendations, references as well as the anthropometric measurement possibilities at home. The model requires age, sex, body mass, height, waist circumference and hand circumference as predictor (input) variables of nutritional status, while (1) the centile values of the measured body dimensions, (2) body fat percentage and the centile of body fat percentage, (3) the nutritional status category (undernutrition, normal nutritional status, overfat/obese) can be predicted (outcome variables) by the new method. The predictive accuracy of the model for nutritional status category was 94.88% in boys and 98.66% in girls. The new model was developed for nutritional status assessment in school-aged children and will be incorporated in the healthy lifestyle module of ‘Teenage Survival Guide’ educational package to be developed by the Health Promotion and Education Research Team, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary. The new monitoring system could help the families to identify the early signs of malnutrition in children. Nutritional status assessment in children at home is suggested twice a year, and in case of suspicious nutritional status abnormality it is recommended to visit the general practitioner.

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Regular monitoring of children’s nutritional status is essential to prevent micronutrient deficiencies, nutritional status abnormalities as stunting, wasting, overweight and obesity. Nutritional status assessment is usually performed by paediatricians by using anthropometry (body mass index, weight to height indices) and/or by body fat-mass measurement (bioimpedance analysis, dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry, computer tomography, etc.). Parents are also interested in but usually fail to accurately evaluate their child’s nutritional status. The main purpose of the study was to help the sufficient collaboration between the physicians and parents by developing a new nutritional status monitoring method for families. The new model – developed by the Health Promotion and Education Research Team, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Eötvös Loránd University – requires age, sex, body mass, height, waist circumference and hand circumference as predictor (input) variables of nutritional status, while the centile values of the measured body dimensions, body fat percentage and the centile of body fat percentage, as well as the nutritional status category (undernutrition, normal nutritional status, overfat/obese) can be predicted (outcome variables) by the new method. The predictive accuracy of the model for nutritional status category was 94.9% in boys and 98.7% in girls. The new model was developed for nutritional status assessment in school-aged children and will be incorporated in the healthy lifestyle module of ‘Teenage Survival Guide’ educational package to be developed by the Health Promotion and Education Research Team.

The purpose of the analysis was to identify the risk and protective factors for health behaviour in European adolescents from population health status and expenditure, mental health status, sexual life, social life and education indices and the existence of national strategies, programmes. National and international databases providing information on the presumed health behaviour predictors were used in the analysis. Furthermore, the age and sexual differences in the main information sources on health issues, sexual life, health-risk behaviour, digital awareness, environmental awareness accessed by Hungarian adolescents were analysed. The existence of national health strategies, the level of health expenditure, the socioeconomic conditions, the level of education and literacy had significant influence on the health-risk behaviour of adolescents in the European societies. Hungarian children in early adolescence sought information from family members and experts more frequently, while children preferred to get information from their friends and from the media in middle-adolescence. Sexual dimorphism also appeared in their preferred information sources, a bigger proportion of boys chose media as information source than girls. A significantly smaller proportion of adolescents sought information from the studied sources of sexual life topics than in the other health issues. Individual health decisions of adolescents are influenced by their interaction with family members and experts in early adolescence, and with a bigger influence of friends and media in middle-adolescence. National health strategies combined with governmental support for health prevention and action plans have the most effective impact on the health-risk behaviour of adolescents.