Child obesity is one of the most common diseases in the United States and during the last four decades it has increased considerably.
According to data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about 17% of children and adolescents in the country are now considered obese, a figure that has increased more than triple sincethe 1970s.
A report published in the edition of this week of New England Journal of Medicine establishes one of the consequences of this excess weight: a corresponding increase in cases of type 2 diabetes among children.
Type 2 diabetes, according to specialists in the subject, occurs when excessive body fat makes cells to use insulin, a hormone that converts sugar into energy.
Over time, blood sugar levels rise and make blood vessels harden, increasing the risk of potentially mortal diseases, such as heart attacks, brain spills and kidney problems, among others.Thus, more than 75,000 Americans die every year due to diabetes, CDC affirm.
This condition was known as 'adult diabetes', since it took years to develop, unlike type 1 diabetes. However, at present, doctors are diagnosing type 2 diabetes in school -age children and sometimesEven in infants.
After reviewing the data on young people from 10 to 19, from California, Colorado, Ohio, South Carolina and Washington, the researchers determined that 12.5 out of 100,000 young people developed a real case of type 2 diabetes in 2011 and 2012. That isCompare with nine cases for every 100,000 young people in 2002 and 2003.
After taking into account age, gender, race and ethnicity, the authors of the study found that the incidence of type 2 diabetes in this age group increased by an average of 4.8% per year during the study period.
The incidence of type 2 diabetes increased a lot in all categories for young people from 10 to 19 years of age, regardless of age, gender, race or ethnic origin.The two exceptions were white children and young people in Ohio.
White children and adolescents marked the lowest incidence of type 2 diabetes and were the only demographic group that did not experience an increase in incidence during the 10 years of the study.
When the researchers divided the data according to age, they found very little difference between young people from 10 to 14 years and those aged 15 to 19.
In 2003, older adolescents had a slight advantage, with an incidence of 10 cases per 100,000 inhabitants compared to eight cases per 100,000 inhabitants for their younger counterparts.For 2012, that advantage had been reduced to 12.9 cases per 100,000 and 12.1 cases per 100,000.