Association between health literacy and body mass index among Iranian high school students
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Rahimi, Tahere
Barunizadeh, Mahbubeh
Aune, Dagfinn
Rezaei, Fatemeh
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
The high prevalence of obesity and overweight in adolescence has become a global public health problem that increases the likelihood of chronic diseases in adulthood. Having a high level of health literacy is a key approach to reducing obesity-related risk factors and ensuring the health of adolescents in the future. The present study aims to assess the relationship between HL and body mass index (BMI) among Iranian high school students. This cross-sectional study was conducted on 500 high school students (250 boys and 250 girls) in Jahrom during January-May 2024. The samples were selected with a random cluster sampling method. Jahrom was divided into two clusters including north and south, and four high schools were randomly selected in each cluster. In each high school, a list of names for ninth, tenth, and eleventh grade students was extracted and students were selected randomly from each grade. Health Literacy Measure for Adolescents (HELMA) was used to evaluate HL. In addition, multivariate ordinal logistic regression analysis was utilized to determine the relationship between BMI and HL. The analysis was performed with SPSS version 23 and STATA version 14 software. A significance level of < 0.05 was considered in this study. The average age of the students was 16.4 ± 0.94 years and the average HL score was 61.9 ± 20.5. The average HL score among girls was significantly higher than among boys (64.6 ± 19.7 vs. 59.3 ± 21.1). Further, the average HL score among the students of the experimental science was higher than that among the humanities and mathematics ones. Totally, the HL among the students was inadequate (28.6%), problematic (28.8%), sufficient (24.4%), and excellent (18.2%). A positive significant association was observed between HL and BMI. The odds of obesity (versus overweight and normal groups) among the students with inadequate HL was 2.1 times compared to those with sufficient/excellent HL. A positive significant association was reported between HL and BMI among high school students. Public health professionals should consistently incorporate educational interventions that focus on increasing health literacy into school health programs to prevent adolescent overweight and obesity.
Date Issued
2025-06-01
Date Acceptance
2025-05-27
Citation
Scientific Reports, 2025, 15
ISSN
2045-2322
Publisher
Nature Portfolio
Journal / Book Title
Scientific Reports
Volume
15
Issue
1
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2025 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommo ns.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Identifier
10.1038/s41598-025-04386-6
Subjects
Health literacy
Adolescents
Body mass index
Obesity
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
19198
Date Publish Online
2025-06-01