Number of fat babies increasing

Babies up to six months old are fatter than their counterparts were 22 years ago, a study says.

The number of overweight infants jumped by 74 percent between 1980 and 2001, the study found. The rise can be linked, in part, to the weight of the mother, the researchers said. Studies have shown that infants of obese mothers regularly consume more calories than those of normal-weight moms.

Prevention needs to start before conception, said Matthew Gillman, senior author of the study and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston. Overweight children are more likely to have asthma, diabetes, high blood pressure and other problems, according to the American Obesity Association.

"What we're talking about is a trend that may translate into adverse outcomes a decade or two later," Gillman said. "Obesity prevention starts early."

Researchers examined 120,000 children under age 6, including 24,000 between birth and six months, in Massachusetts over 22 years. They found that that the number of overweight children in the overall group jumped to 10 percent from 6.3 percent over the 22-year period studied.

Children with a weight-for-height index greater than the 95th percentile for their age and gender nationally were classified as being overweight in the study. The researchers used reference data provided by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta in establishing which children were overweight.

The researchers collected data from visits by the children at 14 medical practices in Massachusetts. All of the children were enrolled in an health maintenance organization, or HMO, which used an electronic medical record system that contained demographic and growth data for the children.

"In addition to demonstrating that we are seeing more heavy infants today than we did 20 years ago, this study illustrates the usefulness of routinely collected information from doctors' offices to address a key public health issue," said Juhee Kim of Harvard, another study author.