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Obese kids have arteries like 45-year olds!
This is so sad and SHOCKING!
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Study finds obese kids have arteries like 45-year-olds’
Many overweight children and teenagers could have severe cardiovascular disease in their 20s and 30s, causing a healthcare crisis. Early identification of the problem is a key.
The arteries of many obese children and teenagers are as thick and stiff as those of 45-year-olds, a sign that such children could have severe cardiovascular disease at a much younger age than their parents unless their condition is reversed, researchers said Tuesday.
“It’s possible that they will have heart disease in their 20s and 30s,” said Dr. Geetha Raghuveer of the University of Missouri at Kansas City, who led the study presented at a New Orleans meeting of the American Heart Assn.
“There’s a saying that ‘you’re as old as your arteries,’ meaning that the state of your arteries is more important than your actual age in the evolution of heart disease and stroke,” she said. “We found that the state of the arteries of these children is more typical of a 45-year-old than of someone their own age.”
Experts did not find the results surprising, but they did view it as “alarming.”
“We’re facing an epidemic of childhood obesity,” said Dr. Michael Schloss, co-director of the lipid treatment program at the New York University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study. “We are raising a generation of children that are going to have a significant increase in vascular disease as they get older.”
A May study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 16.3% of U.S. children and teenagers are obese and an additional 15.6% are overweight.
Raghuveer runs a preventive cardiology clinic for children who have high cholesterol levels, obesity and a family history of cardiac deaths. She and her colleagues used ultrasound imaging to measure the thickness of the inner walls of the carotid arteries on 70 children considered at risk. Read the entire article here.
Take care of you child’s health!
