A third of children in England are overweight/obese

A third of children in England are overweight/obese, finds a 20-year King's College London study of electronic health records, published online in Archives of Disease in Childhood . But the rapid rise in prevalence may be starting to level off—at least in younger children—the findings indicate, although there are no grounds for complacency, warn the researchers. They scrutinised the anonymised electronic health care records of more than 370,500 children, aged 2 to 15, who had accumulated more than half a million weight (BMI/body mass index) assessments, between them, over a period of 20 years (1993 to 2013). The researchers wanted to track any changes in the prevalence of overweight and obesity over these two decades. The children were patients at 375 general practices across England. Their anonymised health data had been entered into the UK Clinical Practice Research Datalink, a large database containing the health records of around 5.5 million patients registered with 680 general practices around the UK. The analysis showed that between 1994 and 2003 the prevalence of overweight and obesity in all children increased by just over 8 per cent each year.