The comparison of kinematics gait pattern of healthy and overweight children

In many developed and modern countries, every year obesity has imposed costs and expense to the countries health system and inconvenience and difficulties for people; in modern societies, these concerns are not limited to specific age, social level or races. According to statistics by the World Health Organization (WHO), about 10% of 5 17-year-old school children are overweight, and 3% of them are obese. In the US, this number is roughly 33% (10% obese) and, in Europe, it is 20% (4% obese). Nowadays, obesity in children is considered one of the most critical health problems that European countries are dealing with, mostly in Italy, Greece, and Spain. Based on literature obesity in childhood has caused the most damage to southern European countries. Moreover based on a report from Asian and Middle East countries, the issue of being overweight and obese turned out to be a global problem so that, in the past years, a massive increase in the number of overweight children population has been reported. Iran, as a fast developing country confronting the increasing phenomenon of urban living and industrialization, the prevalence of obesity among children has increasingly been raised more than the expected percentage in recent years. The percentage has increased by population growing old. As such, prevailing rate of 17% epidemic of overweight and obesity at the beginning of primary school has made Iran correspondent with the big cities in Europe. Among the reasons of rapid overweight growth is the nutrient transition that Iran experienced from the 1990s onward and then it confronted an increased amount of received energy and decreased physical activity, leading to overweight during recent years. In a study in one of the Iran’s city by Tilaki et al., in 2011, the amount of overweight and obesity epidemic among 7 12 year old children was reported, respectively, as 12.3% and 5.8% and, in another survey done at female primary school in Tehran, this amounts were reported, respectively, as 13.2% and 7.7%. Obesity and overweight have many effects on children movement patterns, so the purpose of this study was the effect of obesity on the gait patterns kinematics factors in children. The purpose of this article was to study the effect of obesity on the gait patterns kinematics factors in children. For this reason, 20 students’ boys’ age 7-9 chose based on weight –age percentile diagram from between 90 voluntaries and were classified in two normal and overweight groups. All the children were healthy and had no physical abnormality. The children’s gait was normal.  The SEKA instrument was used for evaluation weight and height and 3D motion analysis was used for measuring gait parameters such as walking speed, stride length, stride width, single support phase duration, double support and swing phase duration. A t-test was used run for data analysis. SPSS 19 was used for statistical analysis and significance was defined as p<0.05. Based on the findings of this study, with continued overloud on children’s movement system, there is no significant difference between parameters of gait such as stride length (0.075), stride width (0.325), and walking speed (0.978), while there was a significant difference in swing phase (0.004), double support (0.036) and single support (0.003) phases duration, between normal and overweight children groups. The result of the present study showed that overweight and obesity affects some of the spatiotemporal parameters in children’s gait which can cause changes in obese children gait pattern. On other hands, attention to children walking pattern, specifically the obese children, can produce more information and awareness about gait characteristics in obese children and also, it can help to solve movement problem to prevent of probability injury and next malformation. For this reason, we recommend spending more attention to obesity and overweight in children; this attention can avoid expenditure society and help to have a healthy community in the future.