Prevalence of obesity among primary students between 2009 to 2014 in China: a meta-analysis

Background: In recent years, obesity has become the major public health problems worldwide. The detection rate of obesity is alarmingly rising among children and adolescents in China, whose population of 120 million are in range of obesity. It was estimated that 8% of her children are obese. Methods: Publications between 2009 and 2014 on the obesity prevalence among primary school students in China were retrieved from PubMed, online Chinese periodical full-text databases of VIP, CNKI and Wanfang. Meta Analyst software was used to sum up and analyze the detection rates included in the previously retrieved literatures. Results: After evaluation of the quality of the articles, 18 papers were finally included in our study, and the total sample sizes on the obesity investigation were 247547, in which 26466 were obesity. Meta-analysis findings showed that the pooled prevalence of obesity in primary school students is 10.0 %( 95% CI: 7.2%-13.5%). Conclusion: Our results indicated that the obesity prevalence status in China was still troublesome, for the situation will go worse if we currently fail to take effective and practical measures.