WEDNESDAY, Dec. 5 (HealthDay News) -- Overweight children and adolescents are more likely to be overweight or obese adults and more likely to suffer early heart disease and death, two new studies conclude.
The first, out of Denmark, found that large children, especially boys, are at an increased risk of coronary heart disease as adults.
The second, based on a computer model, found that overweight adolescents are more likely to end up with heart disease and even dying in early adulthood.
"Teenage and childhood weight does matter," said Dr. Thomas R. Kimball, a pediatric cardiologist with Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. "This is not a problem of middle-aged adults. This is a problem that we have to face as a society in our children."
"When you see a shift at this level across the entire population, it really suggests that this is a major public health problem and requires intervention that really needs to be reinforced at every level of policy makers, every level of institutions," said Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, lead author of the computer modeling study.
"This is more than just a problem of overweight adolescents and their parents. It's a problem that requires really a concerted effort at federal, state, local policy levels to reinforce the availability of healthy foods for kids and the availability of physical activity. We really want to prevent obesity before it starts," said Bibbins-Domingo, who is assistant professor of medicine, epidemiology and biostatistics and the Robert Wood Johnson Harold Amos Medical Faculty Scholar at the University of California, San Francisco.
Both studies are published in the Dec. 6 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
The overweight and obesity crisis is reaching epidemic proportions around the world. In the United States, federal statistics estimate that 9 million adolescents (17 percent of the population) are overweight and 80 percent of overweight adolescents grow up to be obese adults. Childhood obesity rates have tripled since 1970.
