Introduction:

high prevalence of obesity in the paediatric population carries a risk of development of comorbidities, including abnormal blood glucose levels. Objective: to determine whether abnormal blood glucose levels are present in paediatric patients with obesity.

Material and methods:

we conducted a cross-sectional descriptive study in 76 paediatric patients with a diagnosis of obesity managed in the Department of Endocrinology of the Juan Manuel Márquez hospital (Havana, Cuba) between January 2015 and January 2019. The variables under study were: age, sex, type of prediabetes, duration and severity of obesity. We described qualitative variables as absolute and relative frequencies and analysed the association between categorical variables with the χ and Fisher exact tests. We defined statistical significance as an alpha probability of 0.05.

Results:

we found that 71.05% of the patients in the sample had prediabetes, of who 40.59% were female and 72.22% aged more than 10 years. There was a predominance of patients with impaired glucose tolerance (70.37%), of who 50.0% were older than 10 years and 37.04% female. We did not find a significant association between the duration of obesity and prediabetes, but we found an increase in prediabetes with increasing severity of obesity (p = 0.0095).

Conclusions:

we found abnormalities in carbohydrate metabolism manifesting as prediabetes. The prevalence was higher in female patients. We did not find a significant association between the duration of obesity and prediabetes, but we found an increase in prediabetes with increasing severity of obesity.

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