Introduction:

childhood is the time of life when patterns, habits and lifestyles are established which will condition the eating behavior in adulthood.

Objective:

to characterize clinical and epidemiologically children from 5 to 18 years old with exogenous obesity.

Methods:

a descriptive and cross-sectional study carried out on children between the ages of 5 and 18 with exogenous obesity in the Traditional and Natural Medicine Consultation at Pepe Portilla provincial pediatric teaching hospital in Pinar del Río, Cuba, between January 2016 and November 2017, in a sample of 108 children diagnosed as obese.

Results:

the age group from 5 to 11 years (76 %) and female sex (66 %) predominated. The predisposing factors related to weight-gaining were: poor nutritional habits (74 %), obese family members of the first line (63 %), non-compliance with breastfeeding (56 %), low physical activity (56 %). Frequent complications were: hypertension (17.5 %), orthopedic (10.1 %), psychosocial (8.3 %). The onset of metabolic syndrome occurred in 4.6 % of them. Female gender (20 %) was in the 90 percentile, (64 %) in the 97 percentile to a great extent higher than the values for this percentile, being greater the number of girls older than 16 years in this group. This difference is not significant in any of the age and gender groups.

Conclusions:

poor nutritional habits, family history of obesity, weaning of breastfeeding and sedentary life were the associated factors with obesity, important complications were presented.

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