Obese kids may raise rate of heart ills

NEW YORK — The chicken nuggets are coming home to roost. By the time today's teens are middle aged, the rate of heart disease could be 16 percent higher because of the extra pounds they are carrying around today, a U.S. study suggests.

A second study, by Danish researchers, documents a connection between excess weight in even younger kids and heart disease in adults — especially boys.

The two reports in today's New England Journal of Medicine may well be underestimating the future health effects of childhood obesity, said Dr. David Ludwig, director of an obesity program at Children's Hospital Boston.

"We've simply never had a generation that's been this heavy from so early in life. The consequences of that are unprecedented and unknown," said Ludwig, who was not involved in the research.

While the U.S. projections were based on a computer model, the Danish study is a large, decadeslong look at what happened in real life to 277,000 children as they grew up. Some 14,500 of them — twice as many men as women — had heart disease or died from it before age 60.

The researchers found that the more overweight a child was between ages 7 and 13, the greater the risk of heart disease was in adulthood. The relationship was strongest in boys and increased with age.

For example, an average-size 13-year-old boy had a 12 percent risk. But for a boy of the same age and height who weighed about 25 pounds more, the risk went up by one-third, to 16 percent.

"Our findings suggest that as children are becoming heavier worldwide, greater numbers of them are at risk of having a (coronary heart disease) event in adulthood," said the researchers from the Institute of Preventive Medicine in Copenhagen.

Today, about a third of U.S. youngsters are either overweight or obese.

Increasing numbers of obese children are being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, bad cholesterol and other obesity complications that were seldom seen in children before.

Some of those complications are risk factors for heart disease, which could explain the link between childhood weight and a higher risk of heart disease, the Danish researchers suggest. Or it could be because many heavy children — although not all — become heavy adults, they said.