The weights and heights of Mexican-American adolescents: the accuracy of self-reports.

Abstract

The accuracy of Mexican-American adolescents' self-reported weights, heights, and body mass indexes was evaluated with data from the Hispanic Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. On average, adolescents with low measured body mass indexes and high measured body mass indexes overestimated and underestimated their weights, respectively. Categories of low and high body mass indexes created by applying cutoffs to reported body mass indexes had low sensitivities. For weight, height, and body mass indexes, measured and reported values were highly correlated. This high correlation suggests that adolescents' reported values can be used as continuous variables in multivariate analyses with only small errors resulting in the coefficients for weight, height, and body mass index.

Retrospective self-reported weight changes during childhood and adolescence are not good predictors of metabolic syndrome risk factors in Mexican young adults

“…Therefore, we tested whether self-reported weight status categories during childhood and adolescence were useful in predicting metabolic risk factors among Mexican young adults. There is evidence of the validity of self-reported weight and body perception to estimate current weight in among Mexican adolescents and adults [16,17]. However, we found little evidence that weight change patterns based on recalled weight status during childhood and adolescence contributed to the prediction of metabolic risk at young adulthood.…”

“…Therefore, alternative options such as the use of self-reported retrospective information on weight status have been used in large scale studies. For instance, previous studies have assessed the accuracy of self-reported weight among Mexican Adolescents, and also self-reported body mass index (BMI) and body perception among Mexican adults; their findings suggested that self-reported weight among these populations are highly correlated with the measured BMI and thus may be valid to estimate weight in epidemiological studies [16,17].…”

Prevalence of overweight and obesity in Greek school-aged children and adolescents

“…Previous research has shown a high validity of self-reported BMI in older children and adolescents (Tienboon et al, 1992;Davis & Gergen, 1994;Strauss, 1999;Kuczmarski et al, 2000;Himes & Faricy, 2001). Prevalence of obesity in Greek children and adolescents D Karayiannis et al Goodman et al (2000) reported that 96% of adolescents correctly classified their obesity status based on self-reported data, and they concluded that self-reported height and weight could be used to accurately evaluate older children's and teens' obesity risk.…”

The Association of Obesity and School Absenteeism Attributed to Illness or Injury Among Adolescents in the United States, 2009

“…Some studies demonstrated that reported data have high specificity (92%-99%). However, the sensitivity of self-reported data to detect obesity has ranged from 45% to 76% [19,32,33]. This low sensitivity likely accounts for the lower prevalence of obesity that we observed compared with NHANES.…”

“…Second, the sample child's weight and height used to calculate BMI were reported by an adult respondent, typically a parent. Despite the high correlations between measured and parent-reported weight, height, and BMI among adolescents, mean weight is typically underestimated from reported data, with a larger difference between reported and measured data for female than male adolescents [19,[31][32][33][34]. Some studies demonstrated that reported data have high specificity (92%-99%).…”