By the year 2035, heart disease is expected to skyrocket. Why? Because that’s when kids who are overweight now will hit middle age… and those extra pounds will take their toll on their ticker.
Two new studies paint a grim picture of the future of heart disease - the result of the nation’s obesity epidemic. The first one is from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and Columbia University Medical Center. It used a computer model to project the impact of the growing number of overweight teens in the United States.
Based on the number of overweight teens in 2000, the study finds up to 37 percent of males and 44 percent of females will be obese when they turn 35 years old in 2020. That means more heart attacks, more chronic chest pain,and more deaths before they’re 50 years old. The research estimates more than 100,000 extra cases of heart disease by 2035 - a 16 percent increase over today’s figures.
“Today’s adolescents are the young adults of tomorrow – young adults who would ordinarily be working, raising their families, and not worried about heart disease until they are much older,” says lead researcher, Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, Ph.D., M.D., UCSF. “Our study suggests that more of these young adults will have heart disease when they are 35-50 years old, resulting in more hospitalizations, medical procedures, need for chronic medications, missed work days and shortened life expectancy.”
In the second study, Danish researchers finds a connection between extra weight in even younger children and heart disease in adults, especially in boys. They followed 277,000 children as they grew up. Results show about 14,500 of them had heart disease or died from it before they were 60 years old - twice as many men as women. And the more overweight a child was between the ages of 7 and 13, the greater their risk of heart disease was when they became adults.
Both studies are published in this week’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
According to the National Center for Health Statistics, nine million adolescents are now considered overweight and childhood obesity rates have tripled since 1970.
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