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영어

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to compare the risk of being underweight between multicultural and Korean-origin adolescents. Methods: This study used the Korea Youth Risk Behavior Web-Based Survey data of 2016. A total of 46,457 underweight and normal-weight adolescents were included. General characteristics, health status and health behavior variables, and weight related variables were included. Weighted percentage and means were used to describe the sample. Simple and multiple logistic regressions were conducted using SAS 9.2. Results: From the simple and multiple logistic regression, multicultural adolescents showed a higher risk of being underweight (OR: 1.63, 95% CI: 1.20-2.20; AOR: 1.51, 95% CI: 1.01-2.27) than Korean-origin adolescents. Among the covariates, being female (AOR: 1.90, 95% CI: 1.72-2.10), being older (AOR: 1.18, 95% CI: 1.15-1.22), having poor self-health perception (AOR: 1.56, 95% CI: 1.24-1.82), having longer hours of sleep (AOR: 1.12, 95% CI: 1.09-1.16), having fewer days of exercise (AOR: 0.94, 95% CI: 0.91-0.96), and doing vigorous exercise less (AOR: 0.78, 95% CI: 0.68-0.89) showed a higher risk of being underweight. Self-rated health and effort to control weight were also significantly related to being underweight. Conclusion: Since multicultural adolescents are vulnerable to being underweight, it is necessary to develop intervention programs to reduce the number of underweight multicultural adolescents.