Socio-economic status and obesity in children in Africa

. nicely reviewed studies assessing the associa-tion between socio-economic status (SES) and obesity inadults and children of low- and middle-income developingcountries(LMICs)(1).Inchildren,theauthorsidentified11studies, all showing a positive association between SES andobesity in boys and girls. In the African region, the authorsreported findings from only one small study in SouthAfrica. However, they did not include a large school-basedstudy conducted in Seychelles, a middle-income Africancountry (2). In this study, we compared the prevalence ofoverweight and obesity in 8,462 children aged 9–16 in the4th, 7th and 10th grades from all public and privateschools. The prevalence of overweight (including obesity[3]) was 37% in boys and 33% in girls attending a privateschool compared with 15% in boys and 20% in girlsattending a public school (2). Similar observations weremade in a recent study using school type as an SES indica-tor in Botswana (4). These data add information on therelation between SES and obesity in LMCIs, as reviewed byDinsa