The All-New Bunrab

Being overweight or obese can enlarge a teen's heart
Jun 08 (HealthCentersOnline) - The heart health of adolescents may suffer from excess body weight, causing abnormal heart enlargement and impaired pumping function by age 20.
Being overweight and obese has long been associated with an increased risk of heart disease. Obesity is the second leading cause of preventable death, contributing to serious health problems such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, stroke and cancer. Over the past 30 years, childhood obesity has tripled in the United States. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 16 percent of children ages 6 to 19 are considered overweight and childhood obesity has tripled in the United States.

The study examined data gathered from the Strong Heart Study (SHS), a 4,549-person study of cardiovascular risk factors and cardiovascular disease. The study specifically looked at information obtained during the examination of 460 participants, ranging in age from 14 to 20 years old. This group included 245 girls and 215 boys.

The researchers, made up of a team of physicians from the United States and Europe, used several diagnostic tools, including an ultrasound, to measure the size, shape and pumping function of the teens' hearts.

The study found that severe abnormalities in body build (such as being overweight or obese) paralleled cardiac changes, even in people as young as 18. The excess body mass appears to make the heart work harder, leading to an abnormally large heart.

"The main findings are that, when obesity is present, something happens in our hearts to increase its size and wall thickness, which cannot be understood by measurement of blood pressure," explained study author Giovanni de Simone, M.D., F.A.C.C. from the New York Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York, New York and the Federico II University Hospital School of Medicine in Naples, Italy, in a recent press release.

"This excess of cardiac mass, which we call 'inappropriate' in connection to cardiac workload, is also associated with a general impairment of the function of the heart to push blood into the arterial tree and also to distend its cavity to receive the blood returning from the periphery."

The results of this latest study appear in the June 6 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.