(16-12-07) Childhood obesity leads to adult problems, studies say

By ALAN BAVLEY


You know it?s unhealthy for your child to be overweight.
Now there?s alarming new evidence that those extra childhood pounds may lead to devastating health problems in young adulthood.
Two research studies published today link childhood and adolescent obesity to substantially greater risks of heart disease. That means in the years ahead, thousands more people may be suffering heart attacks or chronic chest pain, or dying before they reach their 50th birthday.
The research appearing in The New England Journal of Medicine provides some of the clearest evidence to date that the consequences of childhood obesity may haunt us for decades to come.
?The prospects if nothing is done are potentially catastrophic,? warned David Ludwig, director of the weight-management program at Children?s Hospital Boston and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, who did not participate in the studies. ?The economic costs will be staggering.?
In one of the studies, researchers at Columbia University and the University of California, San Francisco, found disturbing health trends when they plugged weight data on American adolescents from 2000 into a computer simulation.
Their projections showed that by 2035, the percentage of adults with coronary heart disease would increase by up to 16 percent, with more than 100,000 additional cases of heart disease attributable to the increase in obesity. The number of obesity-related heart disease deaths would rise by as much as 19 percent.
The greater prevalence of heart disease would mean more hospitalizations and medical procedures, a greater need for chronic medications, more missed workdays and shortened life expectancy among adults ages 35 to 50, the researchers said.
But the risks are not just hypothetical.
In a second study, Danish researchers used decades of records to follow the medical histories of more than 276,000 schoolchildren as they grew up. They found that the risk of heart disease or a heart disease-related death rose steadily the more overweight people were when they were from 7 to 13 years old.
For example, a 13-year-old boy who weighed about 25 pounds more than average for his height had a 33 percent higher risk of heart disease before turning 60 than an average-size boy, the researchers said.
In previous research, Ludwig and his colleagues predicted that childhood obesity could shorten life expectancy in the U.S. from two to five years by the middle of the century. This would be the first American generation since the Civil War that could not expect to outlive its parents.
While the new studies looked at coronary heart disease, childhood obesity also may lead to more adult cases of stroke, kidney failure and diabetes, Ludwig said.
In a commentary published with the two studies, Ludwig predicted that the costs of dealing with this host of obesity-related diseases could bankrupt the Medicare system and make it too expensive to expand health-care coverage to more of the uninsured.
?Even if the prevalence of obesity doesn?t increase further, this scenario will likely come to pass if nothing is done,? Ludwig said.
Since the 1980s, the percentage of children and adolescents who are overweight has roughly tripled and now stands at 17 percent, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates.
Altogether, about a third of children are considered either overweight or potentially at risk of weight-related health problems.
Pediatricians now see overweight children with health problems previously associated with middle age.

Source: The Kansas City Star

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