Abdominal obesity in adolescents: Development of age-specific waist circumference cut-offs linked to adult IDF criteria

Abstract

We provide age- and sex-specific cut-off points that can be used to identify abdominal obesity in adolescents. The present findings provide a tool that can be used in the clinical setting for the early detection and prevention of adult obesity. Population-specific cutoffs may be required for pediatric ages to diagnose children at risk. 1 | INTRODUCTION The prevalence of pediatric overweight and obesity has increased substantially over the past decades in both developed and developing countries (Ng et al., 2014; de Onis, Blosser, & Borghi, 2010). The risk of overweight and obese youth becoming overweight adults is at least twice as high as their regular-weight peers (Singh, Mulder, Twisk, Van Mechelen, & Chinapaw, 2008). Body mass index (BMI) is a widely recognized surrogate of obesity