The impact of childhood obesity, hypertension and glucose levels on premature mortality in adulthood was assessed.
Most doctors and patients make the reasonable assumption that the presence of obesity, diabetes, or hypertension already in childhood is a serious burden on an individual's health in adulthood. However, this is not easy to prove scientifically, as it requires methodologically correct clinical follow-up spanning decades. The quoted study published in the prestigious American journal New England Journal of Medicine is just such a study, assessing the subsequent health fate of 4857 children born between 1945 and 1984. The average follow-up period of the study group was as long as 24 years. The endpoint against which the various risk factors were counted was premature (i.e. before 55 years of age) death from endogenous (not accidental) causes. A high BMI (upper quartile of the centile grids) was shown to increase the risk of such death by 2.3 times. High fasting glucose levels found in childhood increase the risk of death before 55 years of age by 73%, and hypertension by 57%. The work is clinically important because it assesses the direct health effect of parameters found in childhood on the subsequent fate of the same individuals observed over 20 years, rather than just an indirect population effect.