Psychological Profile of Children with Overweight and Obesity at a Food Reeducation Ambulatory

Abstract

Currently, treatment of obesity represents a huge therapeutic challenge, and limited evidence is available on the effectiveness of the intervention until today. Studies on psychological changes involving overweight children and adults are rare in the literature. This study evaluated psychological aspects of overweight children treated in a University center in Canoas, RS of nutrition education through the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL), as well as psychological aspects of overweight children's caregiversin the same center. The sample consisted of 28 binomials enrolled in the study of overweight, 89.29% presented psychological changes assessed by the CBCL. The results showed that the borderline and clinical populations, are smaller among parents or caregivers and much larger among children. We emphasize that the relationship between overweight and psychological aspects still remain unclear in the literature. There is still a difficulty in understanding a psychological behavioral pattern in the studied population. The importance of this type of study results from the assessment of clinical populations and from the possibility of estimating hypotheses for studies with larger samples and research design. The research sample seems to offer important data or to support the idea of the areas associated to mood regulation as focus of study and intervention.