A team of pediatricians, epidemiologists and preventive medicine specialists affiliated with several institutions in Israel and Denmark found that children born to parents with obesity at age 17 are more likely to be at the same age.
The consequences of parental obesity in offspring
In their study, published in the journal JAMANetworkOpenthe group analyzed data collected during mandatory medical screening prior to compulsory military service in Israel.
Mandatory military service in Israel has for many years provided unique medical data on millions of people living in that country. Because it involves medical fitness tests before service, and because it has been conducted over multiple generations, biological, hereditary, and medical data are available over multiple generations, allowing comparisons of data from related people when they were the same age.
For this new study, researchers compared the BMI of 447,883 children at age 17 with that of both parents at age 17. The participants’ data were collected for the years 1986 to 2018.
The research team found that 17-year-olds born to parents who were obese at 17 had a 77 percent chance of being obese at 17. In contrast, children born to parents who were a healthy weight at 17 had only a 15 percent chance of being obese at 17. And if both parents had been severely underweight at 17, the odds of their offspring being obese at 17 were just 3.3 percent.
The researchers also found that daughters were more likely to be obese in these circumstances overall than sons, and even when only the mother had been obese as a teenager. Children of both sexes were found to be more likely to be obese at age 17 if both parents had been obese at the same age.
According to the researchers, the numbers support theories that there is a genetic factor in the development of obesity in adolescents.
Childhood obesity persists into adolescence
According to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, greater weight gain in early childhood often translates into overweight and obesity in adolescence.
Mandy Geserick, of the University of Leipzig in Germany, and colleagues assessed the age of onset of obesity in a population-based sample of 51,505 children for whom sequential anthropometric data were available from childhood to adolescence (0 to 18 years of age).
The researchers found that in retrospective analyses, most normal-weight adolescents had always been at a normal weight during childhood, whereas 53 percent of obese adolescents were overweight or obese by age 5.
The standard deviation score of body mass index (BMI) increased further with age. In prospective analyses, nearly 90 percent of children who were obese at age 3 were overweight or obese in adolescence.
The greatest acceleration in annual increases in BMI occurred between ages 2 and 6. Among children born large for gestational age (43.7 percent), the rate of overweight or obesity in adolescence was 1.55 times higher than among those who were appropriate weight for gestational age (28.4 percent) or small for gestational age (27.2 percent).
“In this current population-based longitudinal study, we found that obesity manifests early in life and, once present, persists into adolescence,” the authors write.
Childhood overweight and obesity rates decline slightly overall, but increase among disadvantaged families
Although the overall prevalence of overweight and obesity in children and adolescents has decreased slightly in the last decade, rates of both conditions have increased in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods. This is the conclusion of a new study based on data from more than one million children in Catalonia, conducted by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a center supported by “la Caixa,” and the IDIAPJGol Institute.
Childhood overweight and obesity levels have plateaued in many middle- and high-income countries over the past decade, but prevalence rates remain high. In Spain, around 41% of children aged 6–9 years were overweight and/or obese in 2015, the second highest prevalence rate in Europe. In the region of Catalonia, childhood overweight and obesity rates are similar to those in Spain as a whole.
The new study, published in Jama Network Open, is based on data from 1.1 million children and adolescents in Catalonia aged 2 to 17 years with at least one height and weight record in the Information System for Research in Primary Care (SIDIAP) between 2006 and 2016. The children were divided into three age groups: 2-5 years, 6-11 years and 12-17 years.
Prevalence rates and temporal trends for overweight and obesity were calculated and stratified by sociodemographic characteristics: age, sex, urban/rural residence, nationality, and household census socioeconomic deprivation score, calculated using the MEDEA index.
Overall, the results showed that the prevalence of overweight and obesity decreased slightly in both genders and across all age groups. Over the ten-year study period, overweight and obesity rates decreased from 40% to 38% in girls aged 6 to 11 years and from 42% to 40% in boys in the same age group. However, prevalence rates increased in poorer urban areas and in children of non-Spanish nationality.
In areas with lower socioeconomic levels, overweight and/or obesity rates increased slightly, while wealthier areas saw a significant decrease, leading to a wider inequality gap. For example, between 2006 and 2016, the obesity rate for girls aged 6 to 11 decreased by 15.8% in the highest socioeconomic neighborhoods, but increased by 7.3% in the most deprived areas.
Jeroen de Bont, researcher at ISGlobal and IDIAPJGol and lead author of the study, commented: “The data can be extrapolated to Spain as a whole and could reflect the impact of the 2008 economic crisis, which exacerbated inequalities in urban areas and increased the number of vulnerable families, who may be more likely to adopt unhealthy eating habits.”
Children from North, Central, and South America, the majority of whom were Latino, had the highest rates of overweight and/or obesity. Specifically, 56% of boys and 50% of girls from these nationalities between the ages of 6 and 11 were overweight and/or obese. Children of African and Asian nationalities saw the greatest increase in overweight or obesity during the study period.
“With the exception of Latin America, non-Spanish children were less overweight and/or obese at the start of the study, but their prevalence rates increased over the years until they reached the levels of overweight and/or obesity of Spanish children. This trend was particularly pronounced in African and Asian children,” commented de Bont. The “gradual adoption of Western lifestyle and eating habits” by children could explain these results, he added.
Talita Duarte-Salles, researcher at IDIAPJGol and co-coordinator of the study, commented: “These prevalence rates are alarming, since childhood and adolescent obesity is associated with health consequences in adulthood, including cardiovascular, musculoskeletal and endocrine diseases.”
The study also found that children between 6 and 7 years of age were the most vulnerable to developing overweight and/or obesity. “These findings demonstrate the importance of early public health promotion programs, where primary health care professionals can play a key role in identifying overweight children during routine visits,” Duarte-Salles said.
“Specific health initiatives focused on the most vulnerable groups are urgently needed to address the high prevalence of childhood overweight and obesity in Spain and worldwide,” concluded ISGlobal researcher Martine Vrijheid, co-coordinator of the study.
Does antibiotic use during pregnancy and childhood affect childhood obesity?
Antibiotic use during pregnancy does not appear to affect children’s weight later in life, but use during childhood may increase the risk of becoming overweight or obese. The findings come from an analysis published in the journal Obesity.
When investigators reviewed all relevant published studies that examined antibiotic use during pregnancy or infancy and later child weight, which included 23 observational studies involving 1,253,035 participants, they found no link between prenatal antibiotic use and childhood overweight or obesity. An increased risk of overweight or obesity was observed in analyses limited to second-trimester antibiotic use, however, as well as in childhood antibiotic use.
“Antibiotics should be used with more caution in children than in pregnant women,” said the study’s lead author, Yong Xu, MD, Ph.D., of the Affiliated Hospital of Southwest Medical University, China.
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