[Nutritional status of XXXX and adolescents from a town in the semiarid Northeastern Brazil].

@entity1 @entity28 @entity3147
OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the nutritional status of schoolchildren, resident in a semiarid region in the Northeastern Brazil. METHODS: This is a cross-sectional study, involving 860 @entity1 and adolescents aged from 5-19 years-old, enrolled in three public schools in the county. The selection of schools was non-probabilistic type and unintentional. The initial population, which integrated the database, was composed by 1,035 @entity1 and teenagers, and 175 students (16.9%) were excluded because of inconsistency in the anthropometric data, resulting in a sample of 860 students. The following outcomes were considered: stunting ( @entity3147 ), @entity28 (overweight), being the height/age and body mass index/age (BMI/Age), indices respectively used. @entity1 and adolescents with height <-2 standard deviations and overweight and obese weight z score >= 1 were considered stunted. The statistical analysis was descriptive. RESULTS: The prevalence of stunting and overweight/ @entity28 was 9.1% and 24.0%, respectively. Overweight and stunting were higher in adolescents aged 15 and over, compared to other age groups analyzed. In relation to gender, @entity3147 presented itself in a similar way, but overweight was more frequent among females. CONCLUSIONS: The results revealed that excess weight, here represented by the sum of @entity28 , was more prevalent than stunting ( @entity3147 ), highlighting the urgent need for attention to this problem in order to design interventions capable of contributing to the improvement of schoolchildren nutritional status.
