Depicting the analyses of the first National Maltese Childhood BMI study

Abstract

Introduction Obesity is a chronic disease that often commences in childhood. Several publications have shown that a quarter to a third of Maltese children are overweight or obese. Malta will be the first country to measure height and weight (and hence Body Mass Index) for all school children in order to quantify the extent of the problem. Methods This study would include 46,000 children in 150 schools. This would be the first time that any country measured its entire childhood cohort, as opposed to sampling. Hence, it was decided to attempt to facilitate data collection and analysis with the use of bespoke spreadsheets. Results This paper will demonstrate how standard Microsoft Excel was used to accomplish this, greatly speeding up the data analysis process. Conclusion Software should be prepared in advance in anticipation of large amounts of data that need to be analysed and summarised. Particular care must be taken in order to prepare the requisite graphs and tables in advance so as to process the data once and present it in a suitable format for consumption and evaluation.