Childhood obesity is a grave threat to our nation ’s health

We’ve known for some time the prevalence of obesity is growing among Americans — not just adults, but children, too. Obesity is associated with a long list of medical problems, including heart and other vascular diseases, diabetes, and joint problems. It is encouraging that recently the seemingly inexorable growth of pediatric obesity prevalence seems to have reached a plateau. But we still have a future problem looming for population health as these children grow up. A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine evaluates a couple of key questions regarding obesity in children. The article, entitled “Simulation of Growth Trajectories of Childhood Obesity into Adulthood,” evaluates predictions of what will happen to our population health over the coming decades. The authors used methods that are a bit complicated statistically and I’m certainly not competent to evaluate the details of them. But as I understand it they used existing data sets on childhood obesity to predict the prevalence of obesity at 35 years of age, the point at which the health risks of obesity begin to manifest themselves. Previous obesity studies had used fixed cohorts of individuals followed over time. The problem with that is that the dynamics of the population are changing, and presumably environmental risk factors as well. The model in this study allowed for new individuals to be constantly joining the cohort to control for these effects. At any rate, the findings of this...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - Category: General Medicine Authors: Tags: Conditions Oncology/Hematology Pediatrics Source Type: blogs