Violência familiar na infância: fator de risco para o excesso de peso em adolescentes ?

Abstract

Excess weight has been increasingly recognized as a major health problem among adolescents. To identify its risk factors, recently some researchers are incorporating psychosocial factors in explanatory models, including family violence in childhood. However, the issue is still little explored in the literature, this being the first national study on the subject. The aim of this study was to assess whether violence in childhood is a risk factor for overweight in adolescence. Therefore, it was held a cross-sectional study (baseline of the Estudo Longitudinal de Avaliação Nutricional de Adolescentes / ELANA) conducted in 2010 on 1014 adolescents, aged 13 to 19 years, attending 1st year high school level in two public and four private schools locate in the city and metropolitan areas of Rio de Janeiro. Nutritional status was assessed by body mass index (BMI) and family violence in childhood through the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ). Hierarchical multiple linear regression models were used in the analyses. Of the 1014 adolescents, 53.4% were female and 50.2% were studying in public school. The prevalence of overweight was 26.7%. According to the multivariate model, there was a lower tendency to overweight in adolescence among boys who experienced violence such as physical neglect in childhood (β= 0.196, 95% CI: 0.346; 0.045, p  0.011), and according to increasing age for all violence dimensions tapped by the CTQ (β estimates ranging from 0.136 to 0.126, p  0.002). The risk of overweight was higher among adolescents whose parents were overweight. Estimates of BMI variables for mothers and fathers ranged from 0.065 to 0.066 (p < 0.001) and 0.051 to 0.053 (p < 0.001), respectively. We conclude that exposure to violence in childhood appears to be no associated with overweight in adolescence. A trend towards reduction of body mass index in male adolescents who were victims of physical neglect in childhood was noted.