Discussion
At school age, previously undetected health problems of
disabled children and adolescents can be determined by comprehensive
health screening. However, health screening for disabled
children performed in Turkey is generally directed at only one
health problem [7,21]. The healthcare system in Turkey may be
lacking healthcare screenings for special groups, such as individuals
with disabilities. For this reason, multidimensional health screenings
should be performed for disabled children.
Measuring height and weight is very important in the evaluation
of school-aged children's growth. This study emphasizes that most
of the children were in the normal range of height and weight according
to age and gender, but ratio of height and weight problems
(< 3rd percentile and > 97th percentile) was not low. This finding
may be explained not only by the genetic features of visually
impaired children, but also by some inappropriate behaviors in
terms of nutritional habits. Lunch was the most commonly skipped
meal showing the importance of nutritional services at school. In
the literature, there is no other study aimed at evaluating weight
and height states of visually impaired children. In comparison with
the findings of previous studies performed on nonvisually impaired
children, the weight and height states of visually impaired children
seemed similar to nonvisually impaired children [8,13].
The prevalence of being underweight or obese among nonvisually
impaired children ranged between 0.5%e16.1% and 0.9%e