Predictive Modeling for Obesity and Overweight in Adolescents, Current Status and Application to the MENA Region

Document Type

Book Chapter

Source of Publication

Global Perspectives on Health Geography

Publication Date

5-19-2022

Abstract

Obesity is a public health burden that impacts more than two billion people (30% of the world’s population) and approximately 340 million children and adolescents. Adolescent obesity has become a concern in most developing and developed countries, including Arab countries within the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) regions. These countries are at greater risk due to recent urbanization, westernization, and socioeconomic development that has led to changes in dietary habits, lifestyle, and rapid nutrition transition, especially in the second half of the twentieth century. Addressing childhood and adolescent obesity is considered central to tackling obesity. Recent systematic reviews of obesity prevalence among adolescents in the MENA are scarce and old. This chapter highlights the multifactorial aspects of adolescent and childhood obesity and the associated prediction models within the MENA region. It also proposes an obesity prediction model based on a list of potential risk factors for suitable future implementation and validation. The search engines Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed were used to retrieve literature about adolescent obesity and predictive algorithms/ models between the years 2015 and 2020 in MENA adolescent populations and propose a list of potential predictors/risk factors for suitable future implementation and validation. The results demonstrated the lack of accurate population-based predictive algorithms for obesity for this target group. Based on a holistic approach of integrating relevant main risk factors, we proposed an obesity predictive model that could be valuable for informing policy-makers in the region and helping them set up effective national and regional surveillance systems.

ISSN

2522-8005

Publisher

Springer International Publishing

First Page

71

Last Page

94

Disciplines

Medicine and Health Sciences

Indexed in Scopus

no

Open Access

no

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