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Fat Children At Risk Of Heart Disease

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The Associated Press

Published: November 12, 2008

NEW ORLEANS - Obese children as young as 10 had the arteries of 45-year-olds and other heart abnormalities that greatly raise their risk of heart disease, say doctors who used ultrasound tests to take a peek inside.

"As the old saying goes, you're as old as your arteries are," said Geetha Raghuveer of Children's Hospital in Kansas City, who led one of the studies. "This is a wake-up call."

The studies were reported Tuesday at an American Heart Association conference.

About a third of American children are overweight and one-fifth are obese. Research increasingly shows that fat kids become fat adults, with higher risks for many health problems.

"Obesity is not benign in children and adolescents," said Robert Eckel, a former heart association president and cardiologist at the University of Colorado-Denver. It is why the American Academy of Pediatrics recently recommended cholesterol-lowering drugs for some kids, he noted.

Raghuveer wanted to see whether early signs of damage could be documented. She and colleagues used painless ultrasound tests to measure the thickness of the wall of a major neck artery in 70 children, ages 10 to 16. Almost all had abnormal cholesterol and many were obese.

No one knows how thick a 10-year-old's artery should be, since they're not regularly checked for signs of heart disease, so researchers used tables for 45-year-olds.

The kids' "vascular age" was about 30 years older than their actual age, she found.

A separate study tied childhood obesity to abnormal enlargement of the left atrium, a chamber of the heart. Enlargement is a known risk factor for heart disease, stroke and heart rhythm problems.

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