High
Cholesterol Can Predict Childhood Obesity
Although
conventional wisdom is that obesity causes high cholesterol, results
of a study in the September issue of the American
Journal of Clinical Nutrition
suggest that, at least for girls, high cholesterol can be a marker of
obesity developing later in childhood.
"It
is not clear how hypercholesterolemia is linked to high
adiposity," write Andrew M. Tershakovec, from the Children's
Hospital of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and colleagues. "It seems
more likely that hypercholesterolemia acts as a marker of altered
metabolism, which results in excessive adiposity."
This
spin-off from the Bogalusa Heart study compared 58
hypercholesterolemic children (low-density lipoprotein [LDL] levels
greater than 75th percentile) with 215 children who had normal
cholesterol levels (LDL less than 60th percentile). Subjects were age
5 to 6 years at study enrollment, and none were obese. There were
equal numbers of girls and boys, and 41% of the children were black.
Although the nonhypercholesterolemic children were taller than the
hypercholesterolemic children, there were no other significant
differences between the two groups.
At
three- and six-year follow-up, body mass index (BMI) in the
hypercholesterolemic girls increased at a greater rate than in the
normocholesterolemic girls. By age 11 to 12 years, 45.2% of the
hypercholesterolemic girls were overweight or obese, as were 21.6% of
the girls with normal cholesterol. This effect was not observed in
boys, and it was independent of race in girls.
Associations
between BMI and cardiovascular risk factors including blood pressure,
insulin, and blood lipids were stronger with increasing age, and in
some cases were stronger in hypercholesterolemic children and girls.
"Hypercholesterolemia
is associated with increased relative weight in girls," the
authors write. "The increased relative weight, even at an early
age, is associated with a deleterious effect on blood lipids and other
cardiovascular disease risk factors in hypercholesterolemic children,
although the strength of these associations is sex dependent."
Am
J Clin Nutr. 2002;76:730-735
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FACT
Americans
are eating an average of 400 calories more than they did decades ago
-- at that rate an average person can expect to gain 41.7 pounds a
year. NIH
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