Journal of

Background and Aim: High blood pressure in children, especially in developing countries is growing. Birth weight, age and anthropometric parameters such as current height and weight as factors in childhood hypertension and adolescents have been considered. The objective of this study was to evaluate the prevalence of hypertension in children school and it's correlation with birth weight and current height and weight.

Materials and Methods: In a cross-sectional study, between 2006-2008 among 1195924 students in Tehran's schools, 2040 individuals were selected by multistage random sampling method. Inclusion criteria were age 6 to 19 years, physical health and having health card. The twins, students with hypertensive and smoker mothers were excluded. Statistical analysis was conducted by SPSS software version 16. The multiple regression analysis equation was used to determine the predictors of blood pressure levels.

Results: 69 students(3.4%), including 4.84% of girls and 3.5% of boys had high blood pressure(p=0.14). Significant direct correlation between age, current weight, current height, and body mass index, systolic and diastolic blood pressure was found. However, birth weight has a weak reverse linear correlation with systolic and diastolic blood pressure(respectively=-0.152 and r=-0.111, p<0.001).

Conclusion: Attention to Current size, especially Current weight with consideration to birth weight can be helpful to predict blood pressure in adulthood. This is important in monitoring the weight and blood pressure in children, especially child with an abnormal birth weight and overweight children.

Background and Aim: Low weight at birth is one of the main health indexes in evaluating pregnancy period care, and recognizing its related factors is very important. The aim of this study was a comparison of pregnancy age, height, the distance between two pregnancies, gaining weight during pregnancy, economical condition, nutrition, general health of the mothers with low and normal birth weight.

Materials and Methods: The research method was casual-comparative conducted as field-work. From all newborns born since (Jan 2008 to Nov 2009) 168 low birth weight babies with their mother and 157 newborns with normal weight from 20 maternity center at Guilan province were randomly selected. Mothers filled general health questionnaire with the reliability of 0.82. The data were analyzed using SPSS Software.

Results: There was a significant difference among mothers (case and control ) in terms of pregnancy age, height ,distance between two pregnancies, increasing weight during pregnancy, economical condition, nutrition condition and general health (mental), (p0.01).

Conclusion: Various factors affected newborns' weight at birth. Therefore, decreasing the rate of low weight will be one of the main social health indexes requiring cooperation of counter- groups and different organizations such as the Ministry of Health and treatment, psychotherapy, counseling centers and radio/television.