Blood Pressure Risk for overweight children
Posted on sep 2011
In the last years, obesity has become one of the biggest health issues of the world, especially among children. Due to a more sedentary lifestyle and the habit of overeating, obesity is becoming gradually more noticeable in our day to day lives.
A person is considered to be overweight if his/hers BMI (body mass index) is between 25 and 30 kg/m² and obese if the BMI level is over 30 kg/m².
Unfortunately, the most affected by these changes are children. This is the easiest disease to discover, but the hardest to fight against. Annually, it leads to about 300.000 deaths and is most commonly encountered in teenagers.
The list of risks that obese children are exposed to is long. But one of the most important ones is the high blood pressure which is a result of the influence of high adiposity. The highest fear of the researchers when they see a high blood pressure in childhood comes with adulthood then the blood pressure rises even more.
The most recent study was conducted for 1.111 children from Indiana for a period of approximately 4 years.
The result of this study conducted researchers to the conclusion that indeed, obesity leads to a higher blood pressure. 14% of the measurements on overweight children indicated that they were in hypertensive/ prehypertensive stages, while normal weight children didn't indicate any symptom.
The average age of the children enrolled in this study was 10 years, and they were split into three categories: 10 years and under, 11-14 years and 15 years old.
Nevertheless, this study could not respond to the question: why does the blood pressure level increase when adiposity levels increase? What is the process behind this effect and what are the main factors?
This study was published in the Journal of the American Heart Association and was conducted by Wanzhu Tu, Professor of Biostatistics at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis.
It is an issue which remains for researchers to discover which is the process occurring in the body of an overweight person and what are the ways to prevent this disease from occurring.
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