Overview of the study
The office of the deanship of research at the Qassim University, Saudi Arabia, funded this cross-sectional study; and the study protocol was approved by the Research Ethical Committee at Qassim University. The investigators were constrained to sample only the school children of Qassim province because of budgetary limitation. The study was conducted in 2012, and the duration of sampling and data collection was six months. The study participants were all Saudi nationals as the public schools in Saudi Arabia, from where the sample was drawn, are reserved for its citizens. Although the number of male and female students in the Saudi primary schools are comparable, the low enrollment of female participants into the study was due to insufficient female research staff.
Sample and sampling strategy
The sample consisted of 874 primary school children (male: 618; female: 256). It was obtained through a multi-stage random sampling procedure; first, two cities (e.g. Buraydah and Unaiza) were randomly selected from a list of 10 cities in the Al-Qassim province; then a total of 34 schools (30 from Buraydah and 4 from Unaiza according to the population proportion) were randomly selected from a list of 340 schools. Finally, a class list was created for each targeted grades (from grade one to four) in the selected schools. Ten classes from each grade were randomly selected (40 classes). The average number of students per class was around 25, which meant approximately 1000 students were eligible. Being a native, having a provincial residency permit, and an age range of 6–10 years were inclusionary criteria. On the other hand, being disabled (physically or mentally), having a diagnosis of chronic disease, psychiatric illness, or immune-compromised disorder were exclusionary criteria.
All students in the selected classes were invited to participate. The students received a form to be taken to their parents at home. The form included a brief description of the study, an invitation to participate, and an informed consent document. Parents gave informed consent for the children. A total of 874 children were enrolled and completed the anthropomorphic assessment.
Measurement
Height and weight were measured following standard protocol (e.g. bare feet and light clothes), and the scales were recalibrated after each measurement. BMI was calculated as weight (in kg) over height (in meters and squared). The percent body fat was measured with the Futrex 6100 A/ZL body composition analyzer (Futrex, Inc, Maryland, USA) [17]. Futrex uses near infrared light to measure body fat from a single point in the human body, the middle of the bicep in the dominant arm. During operation, the analyzer sends a light beam into the bicep. The fat mass absorbs the light and the lean mass reflects it. The light absorption is measured by the analyzer to determine the percent body fat. Futrex does not require a pretest calibration before operation.
Analysis
All analyses were conducted for boys and girls separately. First, the prevalence of overweight and obesity were determined using the standard four group classification for BMI (i.e. thin, normal, overweight, and obese) [15] and percent body fat (i.e. under-fat, normal, over-fat, and obese) [16]. The cut-off values were age- and sex-specific for BMI and percent body fat. Further, the prevalence of overweight or obesity was calculated for each age category (6–10). For girls, 6 and 7 year olds were put together because there were few girls who were 6 years old. For the comparative analyses between BMI and percent body fat, the bottom two categories were collapsed into one (e.g. thin and normal) and the top two categories into the other (e.g. overweight and obese), for both BMI and percent body fat method. The sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive value, and agreement rate were calculated between the two methods using the binary variables; receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve were generated to estimate the area under the curve [18]. Data were analyzed with SPSS (version 16), and all-tests employed were two-sided with alpha value of 0.05.