Tag: childhood obesity
Adult Diseases Now Striking Children Because Of Poor Diet And Obesity

Adult Diseases Now Striking Children Because Of Poor Diet And Obesity

By Megy Karydes, Chicago Tribune (TNS)

Once seen only among an older population, adult diseases such as fatty liver disease, hypertension and osteoporosis are being diagnosed more and more in children. And you can add to that sleep apnea, Type 2 diabetes and high cholesterol levels. The culprits? Unhealthy diets and growing waistlines, experts say.

Recognizing obesity early and appreciating the cardiovascular decline it can pose for young children has become so important that the American Academy of Pediatrics established guidelines and recommendations for pediatricians, typically not accustomed to seeing the resulting cascade of health issues in their patients.

“Several studies have shown that obesity is under recognized by parents as well as by physicians,” said Dr. Seema Kumar, pediatric endocrinologist at the Mayo Clinic Children’s Center. “Parents in general tend to think they will outgrow it. … It also depends on the ethnic group they’re coming from. In some cultures, being overweight is actually a sign of prosperity. So they may actually not even consider that as a problem.”

Kumar’s observations ring true with a study by the New York University Langone Medical Center that was published online in April in the journal Childhood Obesity. While rates of childhood obesity have risen over the last several decades, the study showed, a vast majority of parents perceive their kids as “about the right weight.”

Dr. James J. Maciejko, a lipidologist and director of the Adult and Pediatric Lipid Clinics at St. John Hospital in Detroit, is concerned by how few Americans in general understand the grave dangers of overeating. Maciejko sees kids eating 3,000 calories a day and reminds them and their parents that young bodies cannot handle that load. In general, he said, pre-pubescent children should be consuming about 2,000 calories per day; if they are quite active, maybe 200 to 300 calories more. After puberty, most boys should consume about 2,000 calories a day and girls about 1,500 to 1,600 daily.

Why? Here’s the list:

Heart disease: With obesity comes the risk of cardiovascular disease. Developing risk factors in childhood can greatly increase the likelihood of heart disease in adulthood. For that reason, guidelines sponsored by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, recommend that all children be screened for high cholesterol at least once at ages 9 to 11 and again at 17 to 21.

These guidelines are meant to help health care practitioners prevent or identify those issues early to minimize more severe health issues later in life.

Diabetes: Overweight children can develop “adult-onset” diabetes, or Type 2, as young as age 8, and the CDC points out that the loss of insulin sensitivity can develop at any age, especially among overweight children.

The complications from diabetes are many: cardiovascular problems, damage to the nerves, kidneys, eyes and feet, and it can contribute to Alzheimer’s disease.

Hypertension: “There are enough studies that have shown that … an overweight child is two to three times more likely to have high blood pressure compared to a child that is normal weight,” Kumar said. Hypertension can cause a range of health problems, from the heart to the brain to the kidneys.

Fatty liver: Maciejko said he is noticing more children being diagnosed with hyperlipidemia, or high fat levels in the blood. Part of the reason simply may be that doctors now are testing children for this.

The pediatrics association “now recommends all kids by the age of 9 have a lipid profile,” he noted. As a result, when kids come in for their wellness visit when they’re 9, 10 or 11, the pediatrician orders a cholesterol profile. “And so, because of that, we’re starting to identify cholesterol issues in kids,” he said.

“When a child (or adult) eats excessive amounts of calories (particularly from refined carbohydrates), the blood sugar rises,” he explained. “The liver attempts to reduce the blood-sugar level by taking sugar up from the bloodstream. The liver converts this extra sugar to glycogen and stores it. However, when the storage capacity of the liver is full, the extra sugar the liver takes out of the blood is converted to fatty acid and triglycerides. The fatty acid tends to accumulate in the liver, causing fatty liver disease (also called nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, or NASH), while the triglycerides are deposited into the blood, raising the blood triglyceride level.”

Fatty liver disease can lead to depleted liver function, and the consequence of high triglycerides is cardiovascular disease, among other things.

Osteoporosis: Just as important as what kids are putting into their bodies is what they’re not. Eating disorders among very young children are contributing to the increase of osteoporosis, according to Dr. Ellen Rome, head of the Cleveland Clinic Children’s Center for Adolescent Medicine and professor of pediatrics at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine at Case.

“So many of the problems we see in adulthood have their roots in childhood,” Rome said. “A classic example is osteoporosis. That’s now seen as a pediatric disease.”

“If a kid from childhood isn’t getting three calcium or dairy servings a day with vitamin D, they can, in their early years, not be putting on the bone they’re supposed to have put on,” Rome said. By not depositing bone during those early years in life, when they’re supposed to be adding 40 to 60 percent of their bone mass, they’re increasing their risk of osteoporosis later in life. “That means that kid is way behind on what they should have been depositing in their “bone bank” by the time they are in their 20s. If they’re five to 10 times lower in their bone density, they’ve doubled or tripled their fracture risks.”

So those health issues all link to the diet problem. What can parents do?

Children’s diets should consist of healthy sources of protein such as low-fat dairy products, lean cuts of meat and eggs; fresh vegetables and fruit; and healthy beverages such as water and skim milk, according to Maciejko. He advises against excess starch such as pasta, potatoes and white bread, favoring whole-grain pasta, rye or whole-grain bread and vegetables as replacements. “Of course, the key to avoiding unhealthy weight gain is moderation in the consumption of food,” he noted, “even the healthiest food.”

Helping children develop healthy eating habits now is the key, the experts say, because the dire consequences are coming fast.

(c)2015 Chicago Tribune. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: A new study suggests that adult diseases can strike children because of poor diet and obesity. (Photo courtesy Fotolia/TNS)

Quick & Healthy: Love That Dirty Water

Quick & Healthy: Love That Dirty Water

“Quick & Healthy” offers some highlights from the world of health and wellness that you may have missed this week:

 

  • Over two-thirds of public water has fluoride added to it, pursuant to federal recommendations designed to prevent cavities. For over 50 years, the Department of Health and Human Services has advised that tap water contain between 0.7 and 1.2 milligrams of fluoride per liter. Just this Monday, it revised its recommendations to cap the amount at 0.7 milligrams, as a response to a surge in fluorosis, a staining of the teeth caused by too much fluroide, which studies show is on the rise among American adolescents.
  • Testing for HIV is potentially about to become a whole lot easier. The first instant HIV self-test went on sale in England, Scotland, and Wales this week. (Laws in Northern Ireland currently prevent the sale of the self-test kits.) The test screens for levels of antibodies in blood and will allow people to screen themselves at home, without going to a lab or a clinic, and get results within 15 minutes.
  • It’s true. TV is making kids fat. A new study conducted by the U.S. Department of Education shows a stark link between sitting in front of the boob tube for hours on end and childhood obesity. Specifically, a kindergartner who watches an hour or more of television a day is 72 percent more likely to become obese. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends children consume no more than two hours a day, but apparently even that might tip the scales.
  • Although it is not yet ready for the market, a new malaria vaccine — the first of its kind — is showing promise in early tests. The vaccine’s efficacy in the long-term fight against the disease is not 100 percent yet, but leading pharmaceutical companies have thus far been able to cure the elusive disease, and this is a promising development.

Photo: Christina Spicuzza via Flickr

Medical Cost Of Childhood Obesity Is $19,000 Per Obese Child, Researchers Say

Medical Cost Of Childhood Obesity Is $19,000 Per Obese Child, Researchers Say

By Mary MacVean, Los Angeles Times

Are the millions of dollars spent to try to reverse childhood obesity a good investment? One answer might be found in the cost if the condition goes unchecked: about $19,000 per obese child in lifetime medical costs, researchers reported Monday.

That’s $14 billion just for the obese 10-year-olds in the United States, according to researchers at the Duke Global Health Institute and the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore. They reported their results in the journal Pediatrics.

A less costly estimate, $12,900 per child, was made for normal-weight children who gain weight in adulthood, they said.

For comparison, the researchers noted that the 2012 fiscal year budget for the Head Start Program was $7.8 billion, and the cost of a year at a public four-year college was almost $17,000.

“Reducing childhood obesity is a public health priority that has substantial health and economic benefits,” said Eric Andrew Finkelstein, the lead author of the study. He also said that efforts to reduce obesity should not be based solely on dollar savings.

To reach their estimates, the researchers analyzed and updated previous estimates by reviewing the scientific literature outlining the medical costs of childhood obesity over a lifetime. They took into account such factors as a decreased life expectancy for obese people and the rising of costs with age. Obesity is a risk factor of such illnesses as heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and some cancers.

While some progress was recently reported in some states to reduce childhood obesity, one in five children and one in three adults are obese, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The researchers noted also that the prevalence of extreme obesity, children who score at or above the 99th percentile of body mass index measures, is rising. And estimates are that half of the adult U.S. population could be obese by 2030, barring successful efforts to change.

Costs of controlling obesity are “significant,” the researchers noted, offering a couple of examples, including a 10-year, $1 billion program to build health-promoting communities by the California Endowment.

Knowing the costs of obesity is one way to justify the expenditures to prevent it, the researchers wrote. They measured direct medical costs of obesity, not costs of such things as lost or reduced productivity. They recommend additional research to account for those.

Photo: Ed Yourdon via Flickr