Does a child's weight at age 5 predict his chances of getting overweight later on in life? A new study says yes.
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine Jan. 30 suggests that a child's risks of being obese by age 14 may already be established as early as the time he enters kindergarten. It also found that kids who are overweight at age 5 are four times more likely to be obese by eighth grade than their counterparts with normal weight.
The researchers used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999 to track 7,700 children who entered kindergarten 1998. Of these subjects, 12.4 percent were obese and about 15 percent were overweight when they started kindergarten.
When they reached eighth grade, 20.8 percent of the subjects were obese and 17 percent were overweight suggesting that kids who started kindergarten overweight have high chances of becoming obese teens. The researchers also observed that more than a third of the children who weighed more than 8.8 lbs. at birth became obese between the ages 5 and 14.
"Something is getting set in those first five years of life which seems to carry forward," said study author Venkat Narayan, a professor of epidemiology and medicine at the Emory University's School of Public Health in Atlanta. According to Narayan, the mother's diet during pregnancy, the child's early diet and physical activity patterns may contribute to obesity risks. "We need to promote the idea of health weight during the first five years of life," he said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that a third of the country's young people are either overweight or obese and 18 percent of elementary-school children are obese. The number of obese children has also more than doubled in the past thirty years. The researchers believe that their findings provide insights on how to deal with the country's obesity problem.
"We speculate that obesity-prevention efforts that are focused on children who are overweight by the age of 5 years may be a way to target the children who are most susceptible to becoming obese during later childhood and adolescence," the researchers wrote.
