The main conclusion of a study of worldwide trends in body-mass index, underweight, overweight, and obesity from 1975 to 2016 is that the number of overweight boys rose from five million to 50 million and the number of overweight girls from six million to 74 million. This negative result has plateaued but is still more than alarming.
The research in Croatia shows there are 15.3% overweight and 3.5% obese children. Obesity is one of the causes of high blood pressure, considered to be the number one killer today, while cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death worldwide.
The Lancet article presents the findings of a Croatian research into the epidemiology of hypertension in Croatia (EH-UH-1), showing that 40.1% of the general population have high blood pressure and 25.7% are obese, which means that only 34.1% of respondents have normal body weight, defined as a body-mass index of less than 25 kg per square metre of height.
This directly impacts the incidence of high blood pressure, which has been recorded among 27% of persons with a normal body-mass index and among 70% of persons with a body-mass index above 30 kg.
Hypertension is more prevalent in regions with higher overweight and obesity. The highest has been recorded in northwest Croatia (43.5%), which has the highest share of overweight people (36.2%), while the lowest incidence of high blood pressure (24%) as well as overweight (17%) were recorded in Istria, the Croatian Littoral and Gorski Kotar.
The second Croatian study whose data were used for the findings presented in The Lancet was based on a survey conducted in several high schools in Koprivnica, where 15.3% of the students were overweight and 3.5% were obese. Overweight students had higher blood pressure than normal weight students, 20% compared to 6.8%.