Last Updated: 2007-12-05 17:00:29 -0400 (Reuters Health)
By Megan Rauscher
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The fattening of America's youth is projected to have dire consequences on their health when they become young and middle-aged adults, according to a report released Wednesday.
"A public health problem of this magnitude requires concerted efforts at all levels of government and industry to assure that our children have access to high quality, nutritious food and programs and places to exercise," Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo from University of California, San Francisco, told Reuters Health.
In the year 2000, 16.7 percent of adolescent boys and 15.4 percent of adolescent girls in the United States were overweight. Bibbins-Domingo and colleagues project that by the time these adolescents celebrate their 35 birthday in 2020, the obesity rate could reach 37 percent in men (compared with 25 percent now) and 44 percent in women (compared with 32 percent now).
As a consequence of increased obesity, "today's teen-agers can expect to have higher rates of heart disease by the time they reach 35 to 50 years of age," Bibbins-Domingo warned. "Their prevalence of heart disease is expected to rise by as much as 16 percent, and their deaths from heart disease could rise by as much as 19 percent."
To some extent this is not surprising, she said, given that being overweight or obese increases a person's risk of heart disease and that overweight teen-agers are more likely to become obese adults.
"We were struck, however, by the magnitude of the increase," Bibbins-Domingo admitted. "Remember that we are modeling heart disease rates in young and middle-aged adults (35 to 50 years). This age group would ordinarily be at very low risk of getting heart disease."
"More of these young and middle-aged adults will be hospitalized for heart attacks, will need chronic medications to control high blood pressure and cholesterol, and many more will die before age 50," Bibbins-Domingo added. "They will be more likely to miss work, and many more will not be in the work force because of disability or premature death."
Aggressive attempts to reverse modifiable obesity-related risk factors like high blood pressure and cholesterol would reduce, but not eliminate, the projected increase in heart disease, the investigators note.
"The high rate of overweight in today's teen-agers is something that will affect all of us well into the future," Bibbins-Domingo said. "The key is to prevent excessive weight gain in children before it starts."
SOURCE: The New England Journal of Medicine, December 6, 2007.
Dr. Sears comments:
The impact of being overweight and increasing heart disease is only a concern if the excess weight is also accompanied by excess silent inflammation in the blood. Unfortunately, my work with pediatric obese children indicates that they are highly inflamed. This means the concerns may highly underestimate the true problem.