Nearly One-Third Of Children Having Surgery Are Overweight Or Obese, Study Finds
January 23, 2007
A very high proportion of children who are
having surgery are overweight or obese,
and because of the excess weight have a greater chance of
experiencing problems associated with the surgery, according
to a new study from the University of Michigan Health System.
Researchers looked at a database of all 6,017
pediatric surgeries at the U-M Hospital from 2000 to 2004,
and they found that nearly a third of the patients - 31.5
percent - were overweight or obese. More
than half of those children qualified as obese, according
to the study, which appears in the new issue of the Journal
of the National Medical Association .
The prevalence of overweight children having
surgery presents challenges to surgeons, anesthesiologists
and their teams. Overweight adult patients are more likely
to have conditions such as type II diabetes, hypertension,
asthma and other breathing problems, and are more likely to
develop infections in their wounds after surgery. The researchers
on this study say those conditions also are becoming common
among overweight and obese children.
"The high rates of overweight and obesity
that we found among children are striking because overweight
children have a higher risk of problems before, during and
after surgery," says lead author Bukky Nafiu, M.D., FRCA,
a resident in the U-M Medical School Department of Anesthesiology.
"This is an important element of the
childhood obesity epidemic, and one that has not received
much attention," says senior author Josephine Kasa-Vubu,
M.D, MS, assistant professor in the U-M Medical School Department
of Pediatrics and Communicable Diseases.
While all age ranges in the study involved
high rates of overweight and obesity, the highest was in boys
and girls ages 8 to 12, further studies," Nafiu says.
Researchers noted that many of these children
are likely to remain obese as adults - indeed, some 60 to
70 percent of obese adolescents are likely to remain obese
as adults.
The researchers also point out that the magnitude
of the problem may reflect, in part, the fact that Michigan
has one of the highest rates of obesity in the United States.
Rates of overweight and obesity in children
has nearly thrice in the last two decades throughout the United
States.
Source from:
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com
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