Children at Risk: Autism Spectrum DisorderPrevalence of Overweight and Obesity in a Large Clinical Sample of Children With Autism
Section snippets
Methods
We evaluated prevalence of overweight and obesity for patients with autism, Asperger syndrome, and control subjects assessed at a large integrated health care system in eastern Massachusetts and compared prevalence among children with autism and Asperger syndrome to children without ASD. We also documented factors associated with overweight and obesity in children with autism.
Characteristics of the Study Population
We identified 2976 children aged 2 to 20 years with an ICD-9 code of autism (299.00) or Asperger syndrome (299.8) seen at Partners HealthCare and who had a weight and height listed at the same primary care visit (Table 1). Subjects were mostly white (80.8%) and male (79.3%), with 5% black and 7% Hispanic. Controls were more evenly distributed by gender (50.1% male) and race/ethnicity (51.1% white, 24.3% Hispanic). Age distribution varied by study group. Control children were younger than both
Discussion
In this study, we found a high prevalences of overweight and obesity in a cohort of patients with autism and Asperger syndrome compared to control subjects. Of children with autism and Asperger syndrome, 23.2% and 25.3% were obese, respectively. To our knowledge, this is the first study showing higher prevalence of overweight and obesity in children with autism or Asperger syndrome compared to control children using anthropomorphic measurements.
These findings are consistent with previous work
Conclusions
The prevalence of overweight and obesity in a population of children with autism is much higher than those without autism. These findings are important to future public health initiatives addressing overweight and obesity for several reasons. First, development of future prevention and treatment interventions should take into account this special and growing population7 of patients and consider how they can best be included. Second, because differences in overweight and obesity emerged in the
Acknowledgments
Supported in part by the APA Resident Investigator Award.
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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.