The correlation between sleep quality and the prevalence of obesity in school-age children

Background: The prevalence of obesity increases year by year. Sleep quality is considered to be one of the obesity causes. The current average sleep range of children in Indonesia was 6-7 hours. This study aims to analyze whether the sleep quality affects the prevalence of obesity in children. Design and methods: This study used prospective cohort as the research method. The samples consisted of 37 primary school-age children (4^th-6^th grade) from West Java and Sumatra. The respondents were selected using snowball sampling technique due to pandemic situation during data collection period. The data were collected by using PSQI and sleep logs (within a month). Results: The statistical results show that there were 19 obese and 18 non-obese children. Fourteen out of 19 obese children were boys, while among not obese children, the number of boys and girls were similar. Twelve out of 19 obese children had poor sleep quality (63.2%), while most of the non-obese children had good sleep quality (83.3%). Based on the chi-square statistic, the p-value = 0.011 < (0.05) indicating that H₀ was rejected, which means there was a correlation between sleep quality and obesity, with OR=8.571 (95% CI: 1.818-40.423). In another words, the children with poor sleep quality were likely to experience obesity 8.6 times greater than those who had good sleep quality. Conclusions: This study found there were correlations between dietary intake, physical activity, sleep quality, and obesity in school-age children. The most dominant factor related to obesity in school-age children is the habitual sleep efficiency (OR=12.354).