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Youth Obesity Now Producing Serious Illness

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By ROB STEIN, The Washington Post

Published: September 14, 2007

Updated: 09/13/2007 11:12 pm

WASHINGTON - The rate of health-threatening high blood pressure has started rising among America's children for the first time in decades, researchers reported this week, a trend long feared by experts worried about the consequences of the obesity epidemic.

After dropping steadily since the 1960s, diagnoses of early hypertension and full-blown high blood pressure began creeping up among children and adolescents beginning in the late 1980s as the obesity epidemic apparently began to take its toll, according to an analysis of data collected on nearly 30,000 youngsters by seven federal surveys.

Although the increases have been small - 1 percent for early hypertension and 2.3 percent for full-blown hypertension - they translate into hundreds of thousands more children developing what often becomes a chronic lifelong condition. Long considered primarily an affliction of the middle-aged and elderly, high blood pressure is a leading cause of a host of health problems, including heart attacks and strokes - the nation's top killers.

'This is a major public health problem,' said Rebecca Din-Dzietham, of the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, who led the study, which will be published in the Sept. 25 issue of the American Heart Association journal Circulation. 'Unless this upward trend in high blood pressure is reversed, we could be facing an explosion of new cardiovascular disease cases in young adults and adults.'

With an adult form of diabetes being diagnosed more frequently in children, and young people developing high cholesterol, the new finding is another indication that the obesity epidemic is spawning a generation at heightened risk for illnesses that struck their parents and grandparents later in life, experts said.

'This is very worrisome,' said Elizabeth Nabel, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. 'In the past we didn't begin to see high blood pressure until someone was in their 30s or 40s. This is another piece of evidence suggesting that the obesity epidemic will likely turn into a heart disease epidemic.'

Previous research indicated the obesity epidemic was driving up blood pressure levels among children, but the new research is the first to document that the higher levels had begun translating into medically significant high blood pressure and a recently defined condition known as 'prehypertension.'

'Our paper is the first to describe an increase in the prevalence of high blood pressure,' Din-Dzietham said. 'I think we should ... ring the alarm bell.'

Din-Dzietham and her colleagues analyzed data collected in nationally representative surveys conducted from 1963 through 2002 by the federal government's National Center for Health Statistics involving 29,165 girls and boys ages 8 to 17.

The researchers found that the prevalence of childhood obesity drifted slightly but steadily higher from 1963 through 1980, when it started rising rapidly. It affected less than about 6 percent in 1963 but nearly 17 percent by 2002.

The percentage of children and adolescents with pre-hypertension rose from 7.7 percent to 10 percent from 1988 through 2002, while the rate of hypertension increased from 2.7 percent to 3.7 percent. That 1 percent increase translates into an additional 410,150 children nationwide, Din-Dzietham calculated.

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