Aug. 10, 2006
 
HEALTH: Study Finds That Overweight Babies Will Mean More Obese Adults
 
By Lee Bowman
Scripps Howard News Service
 
A 22-year-study that tracked the weight of more than 120,000 children under age 6 found that the prevalence of overweight tots has risen to 1 in 10 since 1980.
 
"The obesity epidemic has spared no age group, even our youngest children," said Dr. Matthew Gillman, senior author of the study published Thursday, Aug. 10 in the journal Obesity and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School.
 
Over the course of the study, from 1980 through 2001, the prevalence of overweight children examined at 14 practices affiliated with Harvard in eastern Massachusetts rose from 6.3 percent to 10 percent.
 
All of the children were enrolled in an HMO, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, which used an electronic medical record system to chart demographic and growth data for each child.
 
Infants from birth to 6 months of age had the greatest jump in the risk of becoming overweight of any age group, with the number of overweight infants increasing by 74 percent.
 
"This information is important to public health because previous studies show that accelerated weight gain in the first few months after birth is associated with obesity later in life,'' Gillman said.
 
According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, children with a weight-to-height ratio between the 85th and 95th percentiles for their age and gender are considered at risk for becoming overweight, and those at greater than the 95th percentile are classified as overweight.
 
"These results show that efforts to prevent obesity must start at the earliest stages of human development, even before birth," Gillman said.
 
"These efforts include avoiding smoking and excessive weight gain during pregnancy, preventing gestational diabetes, and promoting breast-feeding, all of which researchers have shown to be associated with reductions in the incidence of children being overweight," he added.
 
On the Net: http://www.cdc.gov/growthcharts/
 
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