Overweight Teens Could Suffer Poor Health As Adults Even After Slimming Down

Adults who were overweight as teenagers are likely to suffer poor health, diabetes and early heart attacks, regardless if they’re obese now or have lost weight.?

Getty Images

Also Read:?10-Year Old Boy Built An App For Kids To Get Active And Fight Obesity

This is according to researchers from the University of California, San Francisco (study published in Journal of the American College of Cardiology) who looked at the health of 12,300 adolescents for over two decades as they transitioned into adulthood.?

The individuals were tracked for 24 years as part of the US National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. Each participant was aged between 11 to 18 years in the beginning of the study and almost 51 percent of the volunteers were female.?

Researchers were looking at the BMI z-scores (measurement of relative weight adjusted for a child’s age and sex) along with several other factors including race, ethnicity, education level, household income and tobacco or alcohol consumption frequency.?

Shutterstock

Also Read:?World Asthma Day: Doctors Clear Asthma Misconceptions, That Affect 8% Of Indians

The team discovered that average BMI of participants was? 22.4 kg/m?, and each unit increase in the BMI z-score during the adolescent phase was linked with a 4.17 kg/m? higher BMI 24 years later, in adulthood.

The team discovered that a higher BMI as a teenager was linked to a 2.6 percent spike in occurrence of overall poor health, 0.8 percent increased risk of early heart attack and an 8.8 percent increase in diabetes.?

Getty Images

Also Read:?COVID-19 Kills More Obese Men Under Age 60 Than Women, Reveals Study

Professor Nagata, one of the lead researchers of the study, explains that these findings have a significant implication on our understanding of cardiovascular disease onset, “Our study suggests that adolescence is an important time period to optimize health and prevent early heart attacks. Paediatricians should encourage teens to develop healthy behaviours including physical activity and balanced meals. Health care providers should consider BMI history when assessing cardiovascular and chronic disease risk.”