Pediatric Obesity Treatment Can Improve Health in Adulthood

Polynesian Woman with ChildrenAn important new paper in JAMA Pediatrics this week tells us that pediatric obesity treatment can improve a person’s health into young adulthood. Anecdotally, health professionals have seen it. Logically, many have long believed it. But this is the first time we have clear evidence for the health benefits of effective pediatric obesity treatment.

In an editorial alongside the study, Leonard Epstein, Myles Faith, and Denise Wilfley explain its significance:

“This is a valuable article that demonstrates for the first time, to our knowledge, the impact of pediatric treatment for obesity on young adult cardiometabolic disease, bariatric surgery, and mortality. These data will be useful to consider criteria for clinical effectiveness of treatment, as well as pointing out limitations in our current approaches to treatment of pediatric obesity.”

Children 6 to 17 Years Old

One must dig into the paper for clarity about this, but it is a study of a Swedish population of children 6 to 17 years old where the “main option” for obesity treatment is “behavioral lifestyle modification.” The authors say these “evidence-based treatment options for childhood obesity have been available for 15 years.”

In this prospective cohort study, the researchers divide their 6,713 subjects into groups for comparison according to their response to therapy: poor, intermediate, good, and remission. Those categories were based entirely on changes in BMI.

But the thing is that good responses or remissions of obesity occured in only 38% of the children in this study. That makes sense if you remember that the primary treatment option is behavioral therapy. The rate of response was higher for younger children – but still less than half.

Better Health Outcomes in Young Adulthood

With that in mind, it is nonetheless impressive that children and youth who respond well to behavioral therapy for obesity wind up being much healthier adults. The likelihood of death, type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, and an eventual need for bariatric surgery were all reduced by more than half. For those who had a complete remission, their risk of hypertension in young adulthood was also cut by more than half.

We should note that treatment response was not linked to a reduction in anxiety or depression.

This study clearly gives us important new findings. Aaron Kelly, Co-Director of the Center for Pediatric Obesity Medicine at the University of Minnesota, tells us:

“These are valuable data demonstrating the long-term durable health effects of pediatric obesity treatment in terms of reducing the incidence of serious obesity driven complications. The best effects were observed when BMI was driven below the clinical cut point for obesity (they refer to it as ‘remission’).”

Children who receive effective obesity care grow up to be healthier adults. This is good news.

Click here for the study, here for the editorial, here and here for further perspective.

Polynesian Woman with Children, painting by Paul Gauguin / WikiArt

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January 24, 2025