Childhood Obesity

Childhood obesity is a growing epidemic around the country. Researchers and doctors are trying to figure out what causes it and how it can be prevented. This essay will discuss a case study that studied the Copenhagen School Health Records Register. This register contained records of 372,636 school children that were born between the years 1930 - 1989. These children had health examinations at their schools in Copenhagen. There were 962 obese children in the Copenhagen (Anderson, Holst, Michaelsen, Baker & Sorensen, 2012). These records contained height and weight information that was taken by school nurses at least once a year. The birth weight of these children was given by their parents and recorded in the schools records. Other medical records were given by the children’s doctors. This essay will define the problem, tell what the main research question is, tell if there is a hypothesis or not, tell the variables in the study like if they are independent or dependent, it will tell if it is a conceptual model or theoretical framework and lastly it will explain the kind of study design used (Anderson, Holst, Michaelsen, Baker & Sorensen, 2012).

The problem in this case study was to find out if infant weight gain and weight gain are linked to obesity later in childhood. This problem is important for health care administrators to study because it could help doctors inform parents about the causes of obesity in their children and let them know how to prevent it from happening (Anderson, Holst, Michaelsen, Baker & Sorensen, 2012). The purpose of this study is to find out why children become obese and if it has to do with how fast they gain weight as an infant. If an infant gains too much weight their first year of life it could cause them to become obese as a child. The main research question in this study is seeing if there is a particular time during infancy that could cause a child to become obese (Anderson, Holst, Michaelsen, Baker & Sorensen, 2012).

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