Overweight and obesity in children with newly diagnosed inflammatory bowel disease

Abstract Purpose Determination of overweight and obesity prevalence in children with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) at the time of diagnosis. Material and methods This was a multicenter retrospective study. The study group consisted of children with new cases of IBD diagnosed in 2005–2013 according to the Porto criteria. Hospital admission records were reviewed for demographic and clinical characteristics. BMI-for-age and gender percentile charts were used to define overweight as ≥85th BMI percentile and obesity as ≥95th BMI percentile. Results 675 patients were evaluated: 368 with Crohn's disease (CD) and 307 with ulcerative colitis (UC). Of these, 54.8% were boys and 45.2% were girls. There were no statistically significant differences in age, weight, height and disease activity between the CD and UC patients. The UC patients had higher BMI values than the CD patients. The prevalence of overweight and obesity was higher in the UC than the CD patients (4.89% CI95 2.76–7.93 vs. 2.45% CI95 1.12–4.59 and 8.47% CI95 5.61–12.16 vs. 1.9% CI95 0.77–3.88, respectively); the differences were statistically significant (−2.44% CI95 −5.45 to 0.49 and −6.57% CI95 −10 to −3.1, respectively). The risk of overweight/obesity was 3.5 times higher for patients with UC (OR = 0.272, CI95 0.14–0.49, p  = 0.0004). Conclusions The prevalence of overweight and obesity in newly diagnosed children with IBD was 8.4% and was higher in patients with UC than in patients with CD. The results of this study have shown that not only malnourished children may suffer from IBD but also children who are overweight or obese at the time of diagnosis.