ESPE Abstracts

Introduction: The Body Mass Index (BMI) is an essential indicator for the nutritional assessment of children and reflects the exposure to health conditions that are harmful to the development of this population.

Objective: To analyze the temporal trends of the BMI of Brazilian children aged 5-10 between 2010 and 2022.

Patients and methods: Descriptive ecological study. Data obtained from e-SUS Primary Care. The BMI categories evaluated were: severe thinness (ST), thinness (T), eutrophy (E), overweight (OW), obesity (OB), and severe obesity (SOB). The prevalence rate, the annual percentage changes (APCs), and its trend were calculated by segmented linear regression. Time series analysis performed in Joinpoint version 4.9.

Results: On average, 3.7 million schoolchildren were assessed each year of the historical series. In the evaluation of the country, we observed a growing character of the categories "OW," "OB," and "SOB" (APC:0.78; P=0.007; APC:3.65; P=<0.001 and APC:2.4; p =0.022, respectively), "E" was stationary until 2020 (APC: -0.66; P=0.483) and decreasing since then (APC: -20.3; P=<0.001), while "ST" dropped (APC: -4.82; P=<0.001). In the Midwest region, "T" was stationary until 2017 (APC: -2.06; P=0.088) and increasing since then (APC:3.9; P=0.020). In the South region, "T" showed a decreasing character until 2017 (APC: -2.49; P=0.006) and an increasing character from 2017 (APC:3.7; P=0.003). In the Northern region, "SOB" showed a stationary character until 2018 (APC: -2.85; P=0.110) and an increasing tendency between 2018 and 2022 (APC:10.2; P=0.029).

Discussion: The growing nature of "OW," "OB," and "SOB" in Brazil suggests the inadequacy of the nutritional offered to this population, with hypercaloric diets associated with a sedentary lifestyle. Surprisingly and contradictory, we observed an increase in "T" in the Midwest and South regions in the last five years, highlighting the nutritional disparities in our country. The concomitant increase in "SOB" and "T," and reduction in "E" from 2020 onwards, is interpreted as a possible reflection of the increase in vulnerabilities with the onset of the Sars-Cov-2 pandemic.

Conclusion: Our data demonstrate the nutritional fragility of Brazilian students, as trends reveal malnutrition with an increase in dietary extremes and a reduction in eutrophy. Significant regional differences and the need to adopt public health policies for each region group are highlighted.