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Childhood obesity [message #6941] Wed, 05 August 2015 16:04 Go to next message
sumonrupop is currently offline  sumonrupop
Messages: 23
Registered: August 2015
Location: Rajshahi
Member

Hi
I want to calculate childhood (<5 years)BMI by using the 2011 Bangladeshi data.Stata software will be used to calculate BMI. But i can not understand how i can calculate the childhood BMI. I am a first time stata user, so if anyone suggest me with possible comment will be greatly helpful for me.




Md. Nuruzzaman Khan
Re: Childhood obesity [message #6971 is a reply to message #6941] Fri, 07 August 2015 09:57 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Liz-DHS
Messages: 1516
Registered: February 2013
Senior Member
Dear User,
Here is a response from Dr. Tom Pullum:
Quote:
For children under 5, the general recommendation is to use the haz, waz, and whz scores from the WHO 2006 guidelines, and calculate stunting, underweight, wasting, and overweight from those scores, rather than using the BMI. The BMI is recommended mainly for adults. However, you can calculate the BMI using the following lines in Stata, after you have opened the PR file. For women, weight is ha2, height is ha3, and BMI is ha40. For children, weight is hc2 and height is hc3, and I will use hc40 for BMI. If you are using the KR file, weight is hw2 and height is hw3. You will get the BMI, hc40, with a factor of 1000, with these lines:

gen loghc2=log(hc2)
gen loghc3=log(hc3)

* factor is 10 million, i.e. 1 followed by 7 zeroes
scalar factor=10000000

gen loghc40=.
replace loghc40=log(hc2)-2*log(hc3)+log(factor) if hc2<9000 & hc3<9000
gen hc40=exp(loghc40)
replace hc40=9998 if hc40>6000 & hc40<.
drop log* 

Quote:
Please let me know if this does not seem to work.
Re: Childhood obesity [message #28387 is a reply to message #6971] Mon, 25 December 2023 02:20 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Madhurima Sharma is currently offline  Madhurima Sharma
Messages: 1
Registered: December 2023
Member
Dear Dr. Tom Pullum,

I have successfully created BMI for children hc40 using the syntax provided by you. Thank you

I wanted to know , what would the suitable categories of BMI children ?
Re: Childhood obesity [message #28419 is a reply to message #28387] Tue, 02 January 2024 12:08 Go to previous message
Janet-DHS is currently offline  Janet-DHS
Messages: 685
Registered: April 2022
Senior Member
Following is a response from DHS staff member, Tom Pullum:

If you google "BMI for children," you will see that there are no standards for children because the distribution of BMI varies greatly by the age of the child. That's why DHS's final reports on surveys only use BMI for adults (specifically for women). For children age 0-4 years, we recommend using the HAZ, WAZ, and WHZ. The third of these, weight-for-height, is most analogous to the BMI, because it is based only on weight and height, and is not age-specific. The cutoffs for the WHZ are at +2 and -2. Children with WHZ>2 are classified as overweight, and children with WHZ<-2 are classified as wasted.

The BMI is calculated from a simple formula, weight divided by height squared (multiplied by a constant that depends on the units of measurement), but the WHZ is based on an empirical distribution, the WHO Child Growth Standards. That's why it's possible to have fixed cutoffs for the WHZ but not for the BMI.
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