Being too heavy and too thin in childhood can harm lung function

TUESDAY, Oct. 29, 2024 (HealthDay News) — Here’s another good reason to help your child reach and maintain a healthy weight: A new study warns that children who are too thin or too fat are at risk for decreased lung function.

However, if their weight can be normalized before adulthood, this limitation can be compensated for, the results show.

“This highlights the importance of optimizing children’s growth, both early in life and during their early school years and adolescence,” said lead researcher Dr. Erik Melénprofessor of pediatrics at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden.

About 1 in 10 children have impaired lung function development in childhood, and as a result they cannot reach maximum lung capacity as adults, researchers explain in background notes.

This increases their risk of serious health problems such as heart and lung disease and diabetes.

For this study, researchers followed 3,200 children from birth to age 24. During that period, their BMI was measured four to fourteen times.

“In this study, the largest to date, we were able to follow children from birth to age 24, covering the entire period of lung function development,” said lead researcher. Gang Wanga postdoctoral researcher in clinical sciences and education at the Karolinska Institute.

Children became too thin, normal weight or too fat at the age of 2, researchers discovered.

Lung function was measured at ages 8, 16 and 24, researchers said, to give an idea of ​​the children’s airway development.

In contrast to children with a normal BMI, children with a high or increasing BMI had reduced lung function as adults, mainly due to restricted airflow in the lungs, the results showed.

“Interestingly, we found that in the group with an initially high BMI but a normalized BMI before puberty, lung function in adulthood was not affected,” Melén noted in a press release from Karolinska.

Urine samples from the children with a high BMI also showed increased levels of metabolites of the essential amino acid histidine. A similar pattern has been observed in patients with asthma chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

“We see here objective biomarkers for the correlation we found, even though we don’t yet know exactly the molecular association between high BMI, histidine and impaired lung development,” Melén said.

But a low BMI was also linked to reduced lung function, in that case due to insufficient lung growth, researchers found.

“The focus was on obesity, but we also need to tackle children with a low BMI and introduce nutritional measures,” said Wang.

The new study was published on October 28 in the European Respiratory Journal.

More information

The Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health has more about it obesity and asthma.

SOURCE: Karolinska Institute, press release, October 28, 2024