Obese Kids Stoke Their Stroke Risk

When I was young, I lived for the summer and warm weather. Everything I did, from June through September, was in the great outdoors. Whether it was playing baseball, building forts, swimming laps, playing tag, climbing trees or eating watermelon, it was done outside. And while I have no doubt that children today also live for the summer, I can’t help but notice the paucity of children playing in their backyards. Frisbees have been replaced with hand-held computer games; fun in the sun has been replaced by fun in air-conditioned bedrooms; swimming the ocean waters has been replaced by surfing the World Wide Web.

Of course, there are exceptions to this rule. There are millions of children who would still rather be outside than inside, rain or shine. But as the numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics reveal, these children truly are exceptions to what’s become the norm: a sedentary lifestyle.

For instance, going back to the late 1960s and early 1970s, just 4 percent of children ages 6 to 11 and 4.6 percent of children ages 12 to 19 were considered obese. Since then, those numbers have increased every year to the point where today, those numbers have more than quadrupled: just under 19 percent of children 6 to 11 are obese and 17.4 percent of 12 to 19-year-olds are considered obese!

I love kids, so if obesity had no lasting impact on a child’s long-term health, this trend really wouldn’t concern me. But because I love kids, and because there are long-term consequences of obesity, this trend disturbs me greatly. The latest finding regarding childhood obesity did little to allay my fears of what’s in store for the Y generation.

According to two studies recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the prevalence of obesity among children today could very well lead to a surge in heart attacks and strokes at ages not typically seen among adults. The risk of strokes and heart attacks increases with age, but a 2006 study presented to the American Stroke Association found that the average age to suffer a stroke is 73 (70 among those with diabetes). For a heart attack, among men, the average age is 66; for women, the average age is 70.

In one of the studies, researchers came to their dire conclusion after using computer modeling that predicts the likely effects of childhood obesity on long-term health, given the current trends. Their results indicated that children’s risk of stroke increased 19 percent after the age of 35. Currently, the threshold age where the risk for heart attack dramatically rises is 45 for men and 50 for women.

Of course, predictors aren’t always accurate, so the second study might hold more weight (pardon the pun) for those of us who question a computer’s accuracy. Here, researchers looked at height and weight data of nearly 277,000 children from the 1930s! They then traced these numbers to the adults of today to see what health effects they did or did not suffer from over time. What they found was that those people who were overweight at a young age were far more likely to have suffered from heart disease before the age of 60! A truly disturbing finding if there ever was one.

I don’t like to be overly negative in my columns, but sometimes you just have to tell it straight: if children don’t take action – and by action I mean more activity – they’re in for a major health scare way before they reach middle age. I’m sure it would have been true then, and because we’ve seen a rise in obesity since the 1930s, we know it’s true now.