Pediatrics & Therapeutics Sohrabi, Pediat Therapeut 2012, 2:6 http://dx.doi.org/10.4172/2161-0665.1000e116 Volume 2 • Issue 6 • 1000e116 Pediat Therapeut ISSN: 2161-0665 Pediatrics, an open access journal Open Access Editorial Children’s Obesity, Overweight and Underweight: Alarms of Youth Epidemics in Future Mohammad-Reza Sohrabi* Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran *Corresponding author: Mohammad-Reza Sohrabi, MD, MPH, Associate Professor of Community Medicine, Social Determinants of Health Research Center and Department of Community Medicine, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, IRAN, E-mail: m.sohrabi@sbmu.ac.ir Received October 14, 2012; Accepted October 15, 2012; Published October 17, 2012 Citation: Sohrabi MR (2012) Children’s Obesity, Overweight and Underweight: Alarms of Youth Epidemics in Future. Pediat Therapeut 2:e116. doi:10.4172/2161- 0665.1000e116 Copyright: © 2012 Sohrabi MR. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Editorial Nowadays following risk factor and epidemiologic transition the world is experiencing more episodes of chronic and non- communicable diseases. Obesity and overweight as a main risk factor for cardiovascular diseases, some cancers and Diabetes has been focused during recent decades. Industrialization and urbanization changed the life style of people; their physical activity decreased following technology improvement and their dietary habits changed toward high calorie and low volume foods [1]. Developed countries mainly are in the inal level of the risk factor transition. hey successfully controlled underweight and under nutrition in children and now their main problem is overweight and obesity following over nutrition and physical inactivity. Developing countries based on their health system function are in diferent levels of transition. Most of them have under nutrition yet as a consequence of inequality in revenue distribution, low education and sometimes cultural issues. On the other hand they faced with over nutrition at the same time but in diferent levels and the burden of obesity and overweight is now shiting towards the poor [2,3]. In the case of disease epidemiology, we still expect to see considerable cases of communicable diseases in children as the result of lower immune system function following malnutrition. On the other side in future years, we expect a dramatic decrease in the onset age for diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, some cancers and other obesity- induced diseases. he reason for this phenomenon is considerable increase in overweight and obesity in primary school children [2,4]. Authorities of health systems should be aware of consequences of these transitions. he best strategy for combating the outcomes of nutritional imbalance is primordial prevention. Public health actions should be considered as the best cost efective tool for control of these risk factors. Field studies should be designed to follow the trend, suggest the best interventions and assess the efectiveness of applied interventions. Unfortunately, the trend of obesity is going to involve even pre-school children; so the target population in these studies and interventions is very wide including pre-school and school children, youths, adults and even older people. A main problem in all countries, especially developing countries, is limited resources for intervention. To overcome this, the most cost-efective group for educational intervention is mothers; the married women who have at least one child should be considered as the irst important target group, especially in developing countries. Developing evidence based policies needs native data for every country. It is recommended to set priorities of health system based on scientiic methods and encourage researchers to develop relevant evidence. his evidence should be valued and used by policy makers. Most of developing countries have serious problems in inter-sectoral cooperation for planning and implementing public health actions. his is another key point for improving preventive programs for combating risk factors of non-communicable diseases. Advising multidisciplinary committees for this issue could help policy makers to overcome this limitation. References 1. Hu FB (2011) Globalization of diabetes: the role of diet, lifestyle, and genes. Diabetes Care 34: 1249-1257. 2. Kovalskys I, Rausch Herscovici C, De Gregorio MJ (2011) Nutritional status of school-aged children of Buenos Aires, Argentina: data using three references. J Public Health (Oxf) 33: 403-411. 3. Popkin BM, Gordon-Larsen P (2004) The nutrition transition: worldwide obesity dynamics and their determinants. Int J Obes Relat Metab Disord 28: S2-S9. 4. Amanolahi A, Sohrabi MR, Montazeri A, Abadi AR, Kolahi AA (2012) Study of obesity levels among school students. Payesh 11: 83-89.