Influence of body mass index on health complains and life satisfaction.

PURPOSE: This research work investigates the influence of children's weight status on well-being and school context in a sample of Spanish adolescences. METHODS: The Spanish records from the 2013-14 Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children Survey are used, which gathers 9,565 adolescences aged 11, 13 and 15. Studies do not usually address the endogeneity of body mass index when analysing their effect on life satisfaction and health complaints, thus resulting in biased estimates. Considering the endogeneity of body mass index, we use the frequency of alcohol consumption as an instrumental variable in order to obtain consistent estimates of its influence. RESULTS: The two-stage least squares estimation shows that children's body mass index has a significant negative influence on health complaints and it conditions the way children relate to each other at school. Likewise, results report significant influence on children's subjective well-being and their self-assessment of general health. CONCLUSIONS: The results of this study provide compelling evidence that BMI plays a crucial role in shaping adolescents' well-being and their interactions with peers at school. These findings underscore the importance of addressing childhood overweight and promoting healthy body mass index levels. Furthermore, the study highlights the need for targeted policy interventions to combat the social stigma associated with being overweight, fostering a more inclusive and supportive school environment for all students.

The association of internet searches and actual suicide in Spain.

High suicide rates are a major issue in Spain, to the extent that they are the main non-natural cause of death in this country. The present study analyses the relationship between Internet searches and actual suicide rates in Spain. For this purpose, we employ data from actual suicide rates and Google® searches for Spain, differencing by the means used to commit suicide. Our results show that suicide ("suicidio") search term seems to be positively associated with higher total suicide rates, in addition to suicides using poison, suffocation and jumping. The suicide ("suicidio") topic presents similar results to the suicide search term, and suicide by car crash also seems to be associated with Internet searches of this topic.

The association between internet searches and suicide in Spain.

Apart from disease, suicide has been the first cause of death in Spain since it overcame the victims of traffic accidents in the year 2007. Nevertheless, in spite of the high number of people affected by it every year, it is an almost silenced issue in this country. In the present research work we make use of Internet suicide-related search terms and official suicide rates for Spain to analyze whether these searches are related to actual suicides between 2004 and 2017. We find that the search terms "commit suicide", "commit suicide without pain" and "suicide" (as search term and as topic) are positively related to actual suicide rates. Thus, the Internet seems to be a consult tool for potential suicide victims in Spain which, joined to an increasing trend in the use of the Internet by the Spanish population, opens the gate for interventions through the results obtained in these Internet searches.