United States: Here’s another good reason to help your child reach and maintain a healthy weight: New research shows that lean and ‘fat’ children are likely to have diminished lung capacity.
But if their weight can be reduced during childhood years before any person attains his full adulthood, then this impairment can be compensated for, data revealed, as reported by HealthDay.
Importance of Healthy Growth in Early Years
“This highlights how important it is to optimize children’s growth both early in life and during their early school years and adolescence,” said principal investigator Dr. Erik Melén, a professor of pediatrics with the Karolinska Institute in Sweden.
A quarter of children appear to have impaired lung growth in childhood, and consequently, they cannot reach their full lung potential as adults, investigators pointed out in notes.
This puts them at a greater risk of severe illnesses such as heart disease, lung disease, and diabetes.
Longitudinal Study
In this study, the investigators followed 3,200 children from childhood up to 24 years of age. Over the course of that period, the kids’ BMI is recorded between four to 14 times.
“In this study, the largest so far, we’ve been able to follow children from birth all the way to the age of 24, covering the entire period of lung function development,” said lead investigator Gang Wang, a postdoctoral researcher in clinical science and education with the Karolinska Institute.
Children were getting too thin, normal weight, or overweight at 2 years old, other researchers established.
Lung function was determined at ages 8, 16, and 24, according to the researchers, so as to show the children’s airway growth.
The study findings reveal that as adults, children with high or increasing BMI had lower lung function than children with normal BMI, with restricted lung airflow being the main cause.
“Interestingly, we found that in the group with an initially high BMI but a normalized BMI before puberty, lung function was not impaired in adulthood,” Melén noted in a Karolinska news release.
Biomarkers Link BMI and Lung Function
Elevated levels of metabolites of the important amino acid histidine were also found in urine samples from children with high body mass index. Patients with asthma and chronic obstructive lung disease have shown a similar pattern.
“We see here objective biomarkers for the correlation we’ve found, even if we don’t yet know exactly the molecular association between high BMI, histidine, and impaired lung development,” Melén said.
Low BMI Also Associated with Reduced Lung Growth
However, researchers discovered that low BMI was also associated with decreased lung function, in this case, as a result of insufficient lung growth, as reported by HealthDay.
“The focus has been on overweight, but we also need to capture children with a low BMI and introduce nutritional measures,” Wang said.