Childhood Obesity and Academic Achievement among Male Students in Public Primary Schools in Kuwait

Abstract

Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate the association between childhood obesity and student academic performance in the classroom setting. Subjects and Methods: A multi-stage cluster random sampling was used to select a representative sample of 1,213 fifth-grade students in male public schools. Height and weight were measured using a standard protocol. Overweight was defined as BMI ≧85th but <95th percentile, while obesity as ≧95th BMI percentile, using growth charts provided by the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (2000). Data on each student’s academic performance and sociodemographic factors were extracted from school records. Of the 1,213 students, 147 were absent on the day the survey was conducted. Therefore, the analysis was based on 1,066 students. Of the 1,066 students, 67 did not have previous school records because they were new in the school; hence the association between school performance and obesity was based on 999 students. Results: The prevalence of obesity was 186 (17.4%, 95% CI: 15.2–19.9%) while the prevalence of overweight was 232 (21.8%, 95% CI: 19.3–24.4%). There was no significant association between obesity and academic performance after adjusting for sociodemographic factors. Parental education was the most important predictor for high academic performance in the classroom setting. Conclusion: There is no association between obesity and academic performance in the classroom setting among boys in Kuwait. With the lack of evidence of a relationship between childhood obesity and academic performance, using high performance as a measure of success in prevention initiatives cannot be justified.

Do overweight students have lower academic performance than their classmates? A pilot cross sectional study in a middle school in Tehran

“…Our results support previous findings pointing out the negative effects of obesity on school performance [10,14]. Almost all the school performance indices measured in our study were lower in obese students; however the differences were only significant for mathematics and geometry.…”

“…There are some investigations affirming the inverse relationship between obesity and school performance [10,14] similar to the recent systematic review and meta-analysis in 2010 which was in agreement with the correlation of high BMI and low IQ in school-aged children as a school performance proxy [24]. Furthermore, Hollar D et al showed that the adaptation of certain anti-obesity interventions controlled not only the students’ BMI and blood pressure but also their school performance [25].…”

“…One of the most challenging psychological co-morbidities of childhood obesity is poor school performance; however, certain controversy remains in this regard. Many studies emphasized on positive relationship between obesity and poor school performance [10–13], while others has proved no significant correlation between these two issues [14,15]. The majority of the existing studies have assessed the relation between Body Mass Index (BMI) and school performance without taking into account serum lipid level.…”

Overnutrition and Scholastic Achievement: Is There a Relationship An 8-Year Follow-Up Study

“…This is in agreement with the findings from several studies whose authors concluded that SA does not depend solely on the current nutritional status of school age children; the possible significant association between Z-BMI and SA were not significant after including socioeconomic strata and maternal education variables in the statistical regression model [8,9,53]. These variables could be stronger predictors of SA, indicating that overnutrition was a marker but not a causal factor for SA; This is also consistent with findings from other authors who found that school age children with OW showed lower SA compared with their N peers; however, these associations were not significant after adjusting for variables such as parental schooling, sociodemographic factors, breakfast consumption ,and screen time [42,43]. …”

“…Our previous findings of studies carried out in Chile and those from other countries did not find any associations between the current nutritional status (according to Z-BMI) and SA; these results confirmed that Z-BMI is not suitable to explain SA [37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46]. …”