Early Childhood Obesity Rates Might Be Slowing Nation-Wide

About one in three children in the U.S. are now overweight, and since the 1980s the number of children who are obese has more than tripled. But a new study of 26.7 million young children from low-income families shows that in this group of kids, the tidal wave of obesity might finally be receding.
Being obese as a child not only increases the risk of early-life health problems, such as joint problems, pre-diabetes and social stigmatization, but it also dramatically increases the likelihood of being obese later in life, which can lead to chronic diseases, including cancer, type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Children as young as 2 years of age can be obese--and even extremely obese. Early childhood obesity rates, which bring higher health care costs throughout a kid's life, have been especially high among lower-income families.
"This is the first national study to show that the prevalence of obesity and extreme obesity among young U.S. children may have begun to decline," the researchers noted in a brief report published online December 25 in JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association. (Reports earlier this year suggested that childhood obesity rates were dropping in several U.S. cities.)
The study examined rates of obesity (body mass index calculated by age and gender to be in the 95th percentile or higher--for example, a BMI above 20 for a 2-year-old male--compared with reference growth charts) and extreme obesity (BMI of more than 120 percent above that of the 95th percentile of the reference populations) in children ages 2 to 4 in 30 states and the District of Columbia. The researchers, led by Liping Pan, of the Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, combed through 12 years of data (1998 to 2010) from the Pediatric Nutritional Surveillance System, which includes information on roughly half of all children on the U.S. who are eligible for federal health care and nutrition assistance.
A subtle but important shift in early childhood obesity rates in this low-income population seems to have begun in 2003. Obesity rates increased from 13.05 percent in 1998 to 15.21 percent in 2003. Soon, however, obesity rates began decreasing, reaching 14.94 percent by 2010. Extreme obesity followed a similar pattern, increasing from 1.75 percent to 2.22 percent from 1998 to 2003, but declining to 2.07 percent by 2010.
Although these changes might seem small, the number of children involved makes for huge health implications. For example, each drop of just one tenth of a percentage point represents some 26,700 children in the study population alone who are no longer obese or extremely obese. And if these trends are occurring in the rest of the population, the long-term health and cost implications are massive.
Public health agencies and the Obama Administration have made battling childhood obesity a priority, although these findings suggest that early childhood obesity rates, at least, were already beginning to decline nearly a decade ago. Some popular prevention strategies include encouraging healthier eating (by reducing intake of highly processed and high-sugar foods and increasing fruit and vegetable consumption) and increased physical activity (both at school and at home).
The newly revealed trends "indicate modest recent progress of obesity prevention among young children," the authors noted. "These finding may have important health implications because of the lifelong health risks of obesity and extreme obesity in early childhood.

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One in 12 in military has clogged heart arteries

 Just over one in 12 U.S. service members who died in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars had plaque buildup in the arteries around their hearts - an early sign of heart disease, according to a new study.
None of them had been diagnosed with heart disease before deployment, researchers said.
"This is a young, healthy, fit group," said the study's lead author, Dr. Bryant Webber, from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland.
"These are people who are asymptomatic, they feel fine, they're deployed into combat," he told Reuters Health.
"It just proves again the point that we know that this is a clinically silent disease, meaning people can go years without being diagnosed, having no signs or symptoms of the disease."
Webber said the findings also show that although the U.S. has made progress in lowering the nationwide prevalence of heart disease, there's more work that can be done to encourage people to adopt a healthy lifestyle and reduce their risks.
Heart disease accounts for about one in four deaths - or about 600,000 Americans each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The new data come from autopsies done on U.S. service members who died in October 2001 through August 2011 during combat or from unintentional injuries. Those autopsies were originally performed to provide a full account to service members' families of how they died.
The study mirrors autopsy research on Korean and Vietnam war veterans, which found signs of heart disease in as many as three-quarters of deceased service members at the time.
"Earlier autopsy studies... were critical pieces of information that alerted the medical community to the lurking burden of coronary disease in our young people," said Dr. Daniel Levy, director of the Framingham Heart Study and a senior investigator with the National Institutes of Health.
The findings are not directly comparable, in part because there was a draft in place during the earlier wars but not for Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom/New Dawn. When service is optional, healthier people might be more likely to sign up, researchers explained.
Still, Levy said the new study likely reflects declines in heart disease in the U.S. in general over that span.
Altogether the researchers had information on 3,832 service members who'd been killed at an average age of 26. Close to 9 percent had any buildup in their coronary arteries, according to the autopsies. And about a quarter of the soldiers with buildup in their arteries had severe blockage.
Service members who had been obese or had high cholesterol or high blood pressure when they entered the military were especially likely to have plaque buildup, Webber and his colleagues reported Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
More than 98 percent of the service members included were men.
"This study bodes well for a lower burden of disease lurking in young people," Levy, who wrote an editorial published with the report, told Reuters Health.
"Young, healthy people are likely to have a lower burden of disease today than their parents or grandparents had decades ago."
That's likely due, in part, to better control of blood pressure and cholesterol and lower rates of smoking in today's service members - as well as the country in general, researchers said.
However, two risks for heart disease that haven't declined are obesity and diabetes, which are closely linked.
"Obesity is the one that has not trended in the right direction," Levy said.
"Those changes in obesity and diabetes threaten to reverse some of the dramatic improvements that we are seeing in heart disease death rates," he added.

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Obesity declining in young, poorer kids: study

The number of low-income preschoolers who qualify as obese or "extremely obese" has dropped over the last decade, new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show.
Although the decline was only "modest" and may not apply to all children, researchers said it was still encouraging.
"It's extremely important to make sure we're monitoring obesity in this low-income group," said the CDC's Heidi Blanck, who worked on the study.
Those kids are known to be at higher risk of obesity than their well-off peers, in part because access to healthy food is often limited in poorer neighborhoods.
The new results can't prove what's behind the progress, Blanck told Reuters Health - but two possible contributors are higher rates of breastfeeding and rising awareness of the importance of physical activity even for very young kids.
Blanck and her colleagues used data on routine clinic visits for about half of all U.S. kids eligible for federal nutrition programs - including 27.5 million children between age two and four.
They found 13 percent of those preschoolers were obese in 1998. That grew to just above 15 percent in 2003, but dropped slightly below 15 percent in 2010, the most recent study year included.
Similarly, the prevalence of extreme obesity increased from nearly 1.8 percent in 1998 to 2.2 percent in 2003, then dropped back to just below 2.1 percent in 2010, the research team reported Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Whether kids are obese is determined by their body mass index (BMI) - a measure of weight in relation to height - and by their age and sex.
For example, a four-year-old girl who is 40 inches tall would be obese if she was 42 pounds or heavier. A two-year-old boy who is 35 inches tall qualifies as obese at 34 pounds or above, according to the CDC's child BMI calculator. (The CDC's BMI calculator for children and teens is available here:.)
The new findings are the first national data to show obesity and extreme obesity may be declining in young children, Blanck said.
"This is very encouraging considering the recent effort made in the field including by several U.S. federal agencies to combat the childhood obesity epidemic," said Dr. Youfa Wang, head of the Johns Hopkins Global Center on Childhood Obesity in Baltimore.
Blanck said between 2003 and 2010 researchers also saw an increase in breastfeeding of low-income infants. Breastfeeding has been tied to a healthier weight in early childhood.
Additionally, states and communities have started working with child care centers to make sure kids have time to run around and that healthy foods are on the lunch menu, she added.
Parents can encourage better eating by having fruits and vegetables available at snack time and allowing their young kids to help with meal preparation, Blanck said.
Her other recommendations include making sure preschoolers get at least one hour of activity every day and keeping television sets out of the bedroom.
"The prevalence of overweight and obesity in many countries including in the U.S. is still very high," Wang, who wasn't involved in the new study, told Reuters Health in an email.
"The recent level off should not be taken as a reason to reduce the effort to fight the obesity epidemic.

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Carlyle takes on KKR in race for Reynolds and Reynolds: sources

Private equity firms Carlyle Group LP and KKR & Co LP have emerged as the lead contenders to take over Reynolds and Reynolds, a software company hoping to sell itself for $5 billion, three people familiar with the matter said. Dayton, Ohio-based Reynolds, which provides business management software for auto dealers in North America and Europe, had hired technology-focused investment bank Qatalyst Partners to run a sale, people familiar with the matter told Reuters in October. The process has progressed and is now in its final stages, though no decision is expected before January, the sources said. Reynolds may be sold to Carlyle or KKR for between $4 billion and $5 billion, less than the company had hoped, one of the people added. The people spoke on condition of anonymity because the negotiations are confidential. Spokesmen for Reynolds, Carlyle and KKR declined to comment. Reynolds sells software tools that allow car dealers to run their operations, including providing car dealer websites, digital advertising and marketing services, as well as data archiving. Reynolds was founded in 1866 by Lucius Reynolds and his brother-in-law as a company that prints standardized business forms. It started to serve automotive retailers as major clients in the 1920s. In October 2006, the company was acquired by Universal Computer Systems (UCS) for $2.8 billion. The merged company retained the Reynolds name and is currently headed by Chairman and Chief Executive Bob Brockman, who used to run UCS. Brockman's $2.8 billion buyout was funded primarily by a group of investors that included Goldman Sachs Capital Partners, the private equity arm of Goldman Sachs Group Inc, and Vista Equity Partners.

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Sandia Lab building solar test centers across US

One of the National Security Administration's three national laboratories is building regional testing centers around the country to field-test hardware for solar companies before their multimillion-dollar solar systems are installed in buildings. The Sandia National Laboratory is building test centers in Albuquerque, Denver, Las Vegas, Orlando, Fla., and Burlington, Vt., the Albuquerque Journal reported (http://bit.ly/Y5OGyw). "The centers are designed to not only provide independent assessments of commercial systems, but to do that in multiple locations and climates," Sandia solar group member Jennifer Granata said. The test facilities will provide enhanced monitoring and improved performance prediction capabilities for new technologies being introduced to the market and will have detailed weather stations and measuring and monitoring equipment such as simulators, performance curve tracers and infrared and digital cameras. They will help develop standard procedures to assess performance of large-scale systems that other labs, utilities and investors can use. Select companies will then set up their own systems of between 10 and 300 kilowatts on site. The companies doing field testing at the centers will be responsible for the costs of their systems, while the government will provide labor and expertise. The lab also just completed a $17.8 million upgrade to its National Solar Thermal Test Facility in Albuquerque. While the test centers will focus on solar systems that directly convert sunlight to electricity, the lab's Solar Thermal Test Facility is working to improve concentrating solar power systems that use sunlight to heat liquids to generate steam for turbine generators. That facility was established in 1976 in Albuquerque, but much of it had never been updated until now. Upgrades included construction of a $10 million Molten Salt Test Loop, and a nearly $4 million overhaul of the facility's "solar tower." Concentrating solar power systems are increasingly using molten salt to retain heat from the sun because it's cheap and abundant, and it stores thermal energy for long periods, allowing the systems to generate steam for turbines well after the sun goes down. But energy developers need a better understanding of how pressure, high temperature and flow rates interact and impact a system's overall operation. The Molten Salt Test Loop is now the only test facility in the nation that can provide real power-plant conditions and collect data to help companies make commercial decisions about such systems, Sandia researcher Cheryl Ghanbari said. Sandia National Laboratories' has a main campus on Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque and another in Livermore, Calif., near the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The research and development facilities work on a variety of federal science projects and are operated under government contract by Sandia Corp., a subsidiary of defense giant Lockheed Martin Corp. Sandia's objectives include ensuring the security of the nation's nuclear stockpile and addressing threats to national security.

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Mundie, one of Gates' successors, to retire from Microsoft

Craig Mundie, one of two Microsoft Corp executives who took over Bill Gates' role at the company, has relinquished control of Microsoft's large research organization and is to retire from the company in 2014. Mundie is taking on a new role as a senior adviser to Chief Executive Steve Ballmer, according to a memo circulated internally earlier this month but only made public on Monday. Eric Rudder, another Microsoft veteran, is taking on responsibility for Microsoft Research, Trustworthy Computing, and the Technology Policy Group, which were all run by Mundie. A 20-year Microsoft veteran, Mundie was one of two men hand-picked by co-founder Gates to take over leadership of the technical side of Microsoft when he retired from day-to-day work at the company in 2008. Mundie took over responsibility for the company's long-term research activities, while Ray Ozzie became chief software architect. Ozzie left Microsoft in 2010. According to Ballmer's memo, Mundie will retire from Microsoft in 2014, when he will be 65. Mundie's new role was first reported on Monday by the All Things D tech blog.

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LSE trims LCH.Clearnet offer amid capital changes

London Stock Exchange PLC has reduced the value of its bid to buy up to 60 percent of European clearing house LCH.Clearnet to take into account new capital requirements being imposed by regulators. The Exchange said Monday that its offer values LCH.Clearnet at a provisional €15 ($19.83) a share, down from the March offer of around €20 a share. The overall value of the deal was not disclosed. It said the reduction was based on the assumption that LCH.Clearnet will have to raise €300 million in new capital. LCH.Clearnet is currently in discussions with regulators about how much It needs to raise to shore up its capital base. The offer for LCH.Clearnet, which clears trading deals, including risky derivatives, has been extended to the end of January.

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