Vanguard Neurologist

From Overweight teens up disease risk as adults

People already overweight in adolescence have an increased mortality rate from a range of chronic diseases, Norwegian researchers said.Researchers at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health said the incidence of obesity among children and adolescents has increased worldwide, but the long-term effects, both with regard to ill-health and mortality rate, have been insufficiently documented.“We found that increasing degrees of obesity among adolescents lead to an unfavorable development in the mortality rate from a range of significant causes of deaths,” Tone Bjorge of the University of Bergen and researcher with the Medical Birth Registry at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.

The study, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, said those overweight in adolescence — both men and women — had an increased mortality rate from endocrine and nutritional/metabolic diseases, cardiovascular diseases, colon cancer and respiratory diseases. There were also many cases of sudden death in this group.

From 1963 to 1975, the Norwegian Institute of Public Health studied 227,000 Norwegian adolescents ages 14 to 19 years and tracked them for on average of 35 years.

Nearly 10, 000 deaths were registered in this group. Cause-specific mortality rate among people who had low and high body mass index were compared with the mortality rate among people who had normal BMI at the start of the follow-up.