Kids’ obesity rates may be stabilizing, data hint
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After years of bad news about skyrocketing numbers of overweight and obese children and adolescents, new data released today indicate that there has been no significant increase in the prevalence of obese children and teens in the United States in recent years.
“In the United States, the prevalence of overweight among children and adolescents increased between 1980 and 2004, and the heaviest children have been getting heavier,” note Dr. Cynthia L. Ogden, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Hyattsville, Maryland and colleagues in this week’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
To gauge the latest trends, they analyzed height and weight measurements obtained from 8,165 children and adolescents as part of the 2003-2004 and 2005-2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), which are nationally representative surveys of the U.S. population.
According to the researchers, the increase in the prevalence of overweight children and adolescents that was seen in NHANES surveys conducted in the late 1980s and early 1990s was not observed in the latest NHANES surveys.
The most recent data, note Ogden and colleagues, suggest no statistically significant change in high BMI for age between 2003-2004 and 2005-2006 and no statistically significant trend in high BMI over the time periods 1999-2000, 2001-2002, 2003-2004, and 2005-2006.
“Even at the highest BMI for age level, no change in prevalence was found between 2003-2004 and 2005-2006, either overall or by racial/ethnic group,” Ogden and colleagues report. “Data from 2007-2008 are needed to further examine the trends,” they add.
In a related commentary, Drs. Cara B. Ebbeling and David S. Ludwig, of Children’s Hospital Boston write that “perhaps recent public health campaigns aimed at raising awareness of childhood obesity and improving the quality of school food have begun to pay off.”
They caution, however, that it is “too early to know whether these data reflect a true plateau or a statistical aberration in an inexorable epidemic.”
Ebbeling and Ludwig say: “On one point there is no uncertainty; without substantial declines in prevalence, the public health toll of childhood obesity will continue to mount, because it can take many years for an obese child to develop life-threatening complications.”
SOURCE: Journal of the American Medical Association, May 28, 2008.
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