Overweight Kids Often Become Obese, Unheal...(9 million adolescents (17 percent of the...),Health

Worldwide, children are becoming heavier at younger and younger ages. In the United States, 19 percent of kids between the ages of 6 and 11 are overweight.

Being overweight or obese puts you at risk of heart disease, diabetes, cancer and other ills.

The first study looked at a group of almost 277,000 Danish children -- all schoolchildren in Copenhagen -- from 1930 to 1976.

Out of that initial group, more than 10,200 men and 4,300 women were identified whose childhood body-mass index (BMI) data were available and who had received a diagnosis of coronary heart disease (CHD) or died of CHD as adults.

Boys with a higher BMI at 7 to 13 years of age and girls with a higher BMI from 10 to 13 years of age had a higher risk of a heart disease event in adulthood, the researchers found.

The authors used as an example a 13-year-old boy who weighs 11.2 kilograms (24.6 pounds) more than average boy his age. He now has a 33 percent increase in the probability of having a coronary event before he turns 60, the Danish team said.

"It's scary," Kimball said. "We knew that if you're an overweight kid, you're at a higher risk to be an overweight adult. This study goes a step further. It's proving that you have an increased risk of cardiovascular events as early as 25 years of age."

The second study projected the number of overweight adults based on the number of overweight adolescents in 2000.

Using a computer model, it predicted that up to 37 percent of men and 44 percent of women will be obese when these people -- now teenagers -- turn 35 in 2020.

This could result in up to 5,000 additional deaths from heart disease and 45,000 heart attacks, cardiac arrests and related events by 2035 among this group of
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