August 29, 2024 | News | SPOTLIGHT

Tackling Childhood Obesity Could Reduce Socioeconomic Inequalities in Adolescent Mental Health

[SPOTLIGHT]

A recent study shows that reducing childhood obesity could reduce inequalities in emotional problems. Socioeconomic inequalities in adolescent mental health are also explained by the unequal distribution of childhood obesity. Children from low socioeconomic status (SES) families have more emotional problems because obesity rates are higher in this group. However, there is no evidence that obesity is more detrimental to mental health in some socioeconomic groups than in others.

Researchers have studied the effects of obesity on the mental health of young people from different social backgrounds. © iStockphoto.com / Dusan Stankovic

A study by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), Erasmus University Rotterdam, the University of Groningen and the Generation R Study of Erasmus MC, University Medical Center Rotterdam, has shown that preventing obesity in children from socioeconomically disadvantaged families could help reduce mental health problems in young adolescents from these groups.

The researchers investigated whether the unequal distribution of childhood obesity between different socioeconomic positions affects the mental health of young adolescents. "A strong motivation for this study was that both mental health problems and obesity are more common in children growing up in families with lower socioeconomic status. There are a number of factors that influence inequalities in mental health, and we looked at obesity as one aspect that may affect these inequalities," says Maria Gültzow, author of the study and researcher at the MPIDR. The study examined whether the mental health of children from families with low SES was more affected by obesity than children from more affluent families.

The study included 4,660 children from the Generation R study, a population-based study in the Netherlands. SES was determined by maternal education and household income. The influence of obesity on mental health was analyzed using special statistical models. "We investigated whether the differences in mental health are due to the fact that there are more children with obesity in the lower SES group, or whether the way obesity is dealt with differs between the different SES groups," explains Maria Gültzow.

The results show that children of mothers with less education and from lower-income households tend to have more emotional and behavioral problems. "Children with the least educated mothers and the lowest household income have more emotional and behavioral problems than children with the most educated mothers and the highest household income," explains Gültzow. "The differences in emotional problems are partly due to the fact that childhood obesity is unevenly distributed across SES groups. However, there is no evidence that these differences in mental health problems are related to the fact that obesity is more harmful to the mental health of children from low-SES families," she adds.

"The results of our study suggest that interventions to reduce obesity in children from socioeconomically disadvantaged families could help reduce emotional disparities in early adolescence. Interventions for obesity often target only individuals. Thus, socioeconomic inequalities related to obesity are not necessarily reduced, but sometimes exacerbated. The social context and causes of these inequalities are often not considered in these interventions. Instead, interventions that target the whole population and different health and social sectors could reduce inequalities in obesity and mental health the most," concludes Maria Gültzow.

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Maria Gültzow was a guest on the EpiTalk podcast to talk about her publication. Tune in here.

Original Publication

Maria Gueltzow, Joost Oude Groeniger, Maarten J. Bijlsma, Pauline W. Jansen, Tanja A.J. Houweling, Frank J. van Lenthe: Childhood obesity's influence on socioeconomic disparities in young adolescents’ mental health in Annals of Epidemiology (2024), DOI: 10.1016/j.annepidem.2024.04.003