Niños obesos tienen el doble de posibilidades de desarrollar Diabetes

U-M study: Obese children twice as likely to have diabetes

Childhood obesity can carry with it some heavy health risks that often last well into adulthood---heart disease, high blood pressure and depression, to name a few.

Obese children also are twice as likely to have diabetes than children who are of normal weight, according to a new study from the University of Michigan Health System.

The study, published in the February issue of Diabetes Care, is the most recent national study to estimate the prevalence of children with diabetes. It found that more than 229,000 children---approximately 3.2 cases for every 1,000 American children under the age of 18---currently have diabetes. And one-third of those children are obese.

The study, was conducted by researchers with the Child Health Evaluation Research (CHEAR) Unit in the Division of General Pediatrics at the U-M C.S. Mott Children's Hospital. It is based on data from the National Survey of Children's Health (NSCH), a population-based household telephone survey sponsored by the Maternal and Child Health Bureau, the National Center for Health Statistics, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
As children's waistlines have continued to grow so has concern that obesity will lead to even more children developing diabetes before they've graduated from high school. And caring for the combination of these children's diabetes and obesity may place more strain on the health care system, says study lead author Joyce Lee, MD, with the Division of Pediatric Endocrinology and CHEAR Unit at U-M.

"Among school-aged children, obese children have a greater than twofold chance of having diabetes, compared with children of normal weight," says Lee.

"The large number of children with diabetes in the US, and the potential for increasing numbers of children developing diabetes with the obesity epidemic, has serious implications for how these children will receive appropriate health care now and as they grow into adulthood."

For their study, Lee and her colleagues used a sub-set of information gathered from NSCH interviews with the parents and guardians of 102,353 children from January 2003 through July 2004.

As part of the interviews, the parents and guardians were asked if their child's health care professional had ever told them that their child has diabetes.

The children were grouped into three categories based on their body mass index, or BMI: not overweight, overweight and obese. BMI was calculated using the height and weight of the child reported by his parent or guardian.

Children with a BMI above the 85th percentile for their age and sex are classified as overweight, while those with a BMI above the 95th percentile are considered obese. For example, a 10-year-old boy of average height would be defined as obese if he weighed approximately 101 pounds or greater, says Lee.

These data provided researchers with evidence of an association between childhood obesity and diabetes. The study found that children ages 6 to 11 and ages 12 to 17 who were obese were more than twice as likely to have diabetes than children of the same age who were of normal weight.

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