Being overweight and thin in childhood can worsen lung function

TUESDAY, Oct. 29, 2024 (HealthDay News) — Here’s another good reason to help your child achieve and maintain a healthy weight: Children who are either too thin or too fat are at risk for poor lung function, a new study warns.

However, as the results showed, if their weight can be normalized before they reach adulthood, this violation can be compensated.

“This highlights how important it is to optimize children’s growth both in early childhood, early school age and adolescence,” said principal investigator Dr. Erik Melen, professor of pediatrics at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.

About 1 in 10 children experience decreased lung function development during childhood and, as a result, fail to achieve maximum lung capacity as adults, the researchers explained in background notes.

This increases the risk of serious health problems such as heart disease, lung disease and diabetes.

In this study, researchers followed 3,200 children from birth to age 24. During this period, children’s BMI was measured from 4 to 14 times.

“In this study, the largest to date, we were able to follow children from birth to 24 years of age, covering the entire developmental period of lung function,” said lead researcher Gan Wang, a postdoctoral fellow in clinical research. science and education with the Karolinska Institutet.

Researchers have found that children begin to become too thin, normal weight, or too fat by age two.

Lung function was measured at ages 8, 16 and 24 to provide insight into children’s airway development, the researchers said.

The results show that, unlike children with a normal BMI, children with a high or increasing BMI experienced impaired lung function as adults, primarily as a result of airflow limitation in the lungs.

“Interestingly, we found that in the group with an initially high BMI but normalized before puberty, lung function was not impaired in adulthood,” Meulen said in a Karolinska press release.

Urine samples from children with high BMI also showed increased levels of metabolites of the essential amino acid histidine. A similar pattern was observed in patients with asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

“We see here objective biomarkers of the correlation we found, even if we don’t yet know exactly the molecular link between high BMI, histidine and impaired lung development,” Melen said.

However, the researchers found that low BMI was also associated with decreased lung function, in this case due to poor lung growth.

“The focus is on overweight, but we also need to reach children with low BMI and implement nutrition interventions,” Wang said.

The new study was published October 28 in the journal European Respiratory Journal.

Additional information

Harvard School of Public Health TC Chana has more information on obesity and asthma.

SOURCE: Karolinska Institutet, press release October 28, 2024