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Over Weight Kids Put Their Hearts at Risk

Posted: Thursday, December 13, 2007

A new U.S. study finds that by the time today's teens reach middle age, the rate of heart disease could be 16 percent higher because of the extra pounds they are carrying today.

A second study, by Danish researchers, documents a connection between excess weight in even younger kids and heart disease in adults -- especially boys.

The two reports in last week’s New England Journal of Medicine may well underestimate the future health effects of childhood obesity, said Dr. David Ludwig, director of an obesity program at Children's Hospital Boston.

"We've simply never had a generation that's been this heavy from so early in life. The consequences of that are unprecedented and unknown," said Ludwig, who was not involved in the research.

While the U.S. projections were based on a computer model, the Danish study is a large, decades-long look at what happened in real life to 277,000 children as they grew up. About 14,500 of them -- twice as many men as women -- had heart disease or died from it before age 60.

The researchers found that the more overweight a child was between ages 7 and 13, the greater the risk of heart disease was in adulthood. The relationship was strongest in boys and increased with age.

"Our findings suggest that as children are becoming heavier worldwide, greater numbers of them are at risk of having a [coronary heart disease] event in adulthood," said the researchers from the Institute of Preventive Medicine in Copenhagen.

Today, about a third of U.S. youngsters are either overweight or obese. Increasing numbers of obese children are being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and other complications that were seldom seen in children before.

Some of those complications are risk factors for heart disease.

Their study used detailed health records kept for every schoolchild in Denmark. They calculated the body mass index for children born between 1930 and 1976.

The U.S. researchers used obesity figures for U.S. teens in 2000 to estimate that as many as 37 percent of men would be obese when they reached 35, compared to 25 percent now. For women, as many as 44 percent would be obese; now the rate is 32 percent.

Using a computer model, they estimated that by the time the teens are 50, the rate of heart disease will rise 5 percent to 16 percent -- as many as 100,000 extra cases a year.

Source: Diabetes In Control: NEJM Nov 2007