“Obesity Resilience”: Few Kids Outgrow Weight Problems

Few young school-aged children are able to outgrow their weight problems and reach a healthy weight later in childhood, a new study concludes.

Investigators at All Children’s Hospital Johns Hopkins Medicine, in St. Petersburg, Fla., analyzed 5 years of data collected by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics on more than 9,400 children. Measures of the nationally represented pediatric cohort included BMI, race/ethnicity, sex, and socioeconomic status.

How often early childhood obesity is “reversed” later in childhood has received limited study despite a growing epidemic, the authors noted. They hypothesized that the characteristics associated with favorable growth patterns, such as healthy weight maintenance or a return to healthy weight, could provide insights into potential protective factors related to pediatric obesity.

Among the key findings of the research:

• Fewer than 1 in 5 kindergarteners identified in at-risk weight categories outgrow their at-risk weight by 5th grade.

• Hispanic children were less likely to maintain a healthy weight or return to a healthy weight during their early school years.

• Children were most likely to return to a healthy weight between kindergarten and first grade, while few children return to healthy weight in later grades.

• About 70% of children who had healthy weight as kindergarteners maintained their healthy weight as they grew older, a finding that suggests healthy weight at an early age is a powerful predictor of healthy weight in later childhood—a phenomenon the researchers call “obesity resilience.”

“Our findings signal a worrisome trend of persistent weight troubles that don’t simply go away as children grow and age,” said Raquel Hernandez, MD, MPH, lead investigator and assistant professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and associate director of medical education at All Children’s Hospital. “Our results underscore the critical importance of achieving healthy weight before kindergarten, which emerges as a critical predictor of healthy weight during school years and puts youngsters on a lifelong path to optimal health.”

Hernandez and her colleagues presented the study’s findings Sunday, May 4, 2014, at the Pediatric Academic Societies Annual Meeting in Vancouver, Canada.

—Michael Gerchufsky

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Reference:

Hernandez RG, Marcell AV, Garcia J, Amankwah E, Cheng TL. Prevalence of healthy weight maintenance and reversal of at-risk weight patterns during school-age: a longitudinal analysis from the ECLS-K cohort. Paper presented at: Pediatric Academic Societies Annual Meeting; May 3-6, 2014; Vancouver, Canada. Abstract 2710.6.