Assessment of Overweight Child Health Case

Assessment of Overweight Child Health Case Your Name Subject and Section Date The body mass index (BMI) is the assessment tool that is generally used in taking the necessary systematic measurements of size shape and the composition of the human body (Nuttall, 201458). This assessment tool is necessary in medical health care especially when taking in the data of overweight and obese children and adults (Krebs et al., 2007). The BMI can be calculated by measuring both the body weight (in kilograms) and height (in meters), in kilograms, then, dividing the body weight by the height squared. After which, the acquired BMI value will be categorized based on the published tables for desirable weight for height, including other values such as underweight and overweight depending on the sex and age of a person (Nuttall, 2015). The World Health Organization developed uniform categories of using the BMI depending on the measured range: underweight (15 to 19.9), normal weight (20 to 24.9), overweight (25 to 29.9), and obese (30 or greater) (Nuttall, 2015).This Body Mass Index was an improved version of the first table of desirable ratio of height and weight that is made by the Metropolitan Life Insurance, which was heavily criticized by Keys et al. (1972), where they questioned the validity of the table (as cited in Nuttall, 2015). As indicated in the BMI formula, the height is squared before being divided with the weight. The squaring of the height normalized the body mass distribution and it reduces the effect of variance in height where it reduces the contribution of the length of the lower appendages in measuring the total body mass. The squared height is important so that it can consider the body fat that is mostly located at the trunk region of the body (Nuttall, 2015). Added by Nuttall (2015), the BMI has a practical purpose in studying population-based data to observe specific categories of body mass as a health problem; however, the BMI is a poor indicator of the body's fat content percentage. Although the BMI is a standard assessment tool in health care services, the BMI is insuffient since it does not accurately measure the body fat content of a person, and also it does not consider other behavioral concerns that contributes to a person being overweight or obese. In this paper, the assigned child is an overweight 5-year-old African American boy with overweight parents who work full time and the boy spends his time after school with his grandmother. An overweight child is defined as having a BMI value that is above the indicated normal value based of sex and age. Having a BMI above the normal value is associated with high lipid content in the body and increased blood pressure, which both carries an increased risk of acquiring different mortality causing diseases such arterial hypertension, diabetes, heart diseases and many forms of cancer (Gutin, 2019; Wein, Yang, and Goldhaber-Fiebert, 2012). Additional information, other than the BMI is needed to assess the health-related disease: location of accumulated fat and dietary factors. The localization of the accumulated body fat should be additionally acquired since the location of fat is essential in assessing the consequences of excessive fat accumulation depending on the area affected (Nuttall, 2015). The accumulation of body fat in the trunk region versus the accumulated body fat in the lower extremities will be associated with different health risks. Usually, men accumulate fat at the trunk r...