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Warning: diabetes in increasing in hispanic children


07/29/2005

Recent headlines about the health of the nation's youth have raised alarm, but a new study shows that the pervasiveness of the early stages of heart disease and diabetes among Latino children may be particularly disturbing.

Three in 10 pre-teens, ages 8 to 13, in the University of Southern California Study of Latinos at Risk (SOLAR) Diabetes Project have the “Metabolic Syndrome”, a condition that is a precursor to diabetes.

In the second study, 90% of the 126 children examined had at least one of the medical markers that is a red flag for diabetes or heart disease, such as abdominal obesity, high blood pressure, low levels of good cholesterol and high triglycerides.

Michael Goran, professor of preventive medicine, physiology and biophysics at the University of Southern California, and participant in the study, said that at least 40% of Hispanic children in the pre-teen to early-teen years are too heavy, about twice as many as a decade ago and tests for diabetes and abnormal cholesterol levels, which usually are done only on adults, should begin much earlier for all obese children.

From Salud Latina
Until recent years, type 2 diabetes occurred almost exclusively in middle age or older, but it is increasingly being diagnosed in overweight children and teens. These children may already be moving toward diabetes or heart disease, these two studies suggest.

The truth is that statistics for Hispanic adult population in 2002, show the importance of preventing this disease in children. On average, Hispanic/Latino Americans are 1.5 times more likely to have diabetes than non-Hispanic whites of similar age.

Diabetes is a group of diseases characterized by high levels of blood glucose resulting from defects in insulin production, insulin action, or both. Diabetes can be associated with serious complications and premature death, but people with diabetes can take steps to control the disease and lower the risk of complications.

Doctors and parents should be aware of these risk factors in obese children with a strong family history, she said. "The hope is if we could identify them and get them into some kind of lifestyle intervention, we could reverse some of this." The studies are published in the January issue of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.