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 “We do not know if (these changes) are clinically meaningful or
necessarily dangerous,” said Dr. Norman Mangner of the University of
Leipzig Heart Center in Germany. “This is a cross sectional study
and, therefore, we cannot answer this question.”
Still, some of the heart characteristics of obese adolescents were
similar to those of children with leukemia after chemotherapy, he
wrote in an email to Reuters Health.
The researchers write in JACC: Cardiovascular Imaging, which is a
journal of the American College of Cardiology, that obesity is tied
to changes in the heart in adults. Those changes may occur even
earlier among obese children, however.
For the new study, Mangner and his colleagues took blood samples
from 101 adolescents between age nine and 16 years, including 61 who
were obese. They also took sonograms, known as two-dimensional
echocardiograms, of the adolescents’ hearts to watch their beats.
The obese youngsters had enlarged chambers on both sides of their
hearts. They also had thicker walls in the left chamber, which pumps
oxygen-rich blood to the rest of the body.
The obese adolescents’ hearts also appeared to be working harder by
pumping a higher volume of blood with each beat, compared to thinner
participants, according to the researchers.
Obese adolescents had higher blood pressure readings than thinner
participants. The blood pressure readings were still within normal
limits, however. Obese participants also had more “bad” LDL
cholesterol and less “good” HDL cholesterol than the non-obese kids.
“I think this was already pretty well known,” said Dr. Sheldon E.
Litwin, a cardiologist and cardiac imaging specialist at the Medical
University of South Carolina in Charleston.
Left ventricular hypertrophy, which is an increase in mass of the
heart’s walls, is known to be a risk factor for heart disease, said
Litwin, who was not involved in the new study.
“When it’s longstanding it can become problematic,” he told Reuters
Health by phone. “The heart muscle can become stiff if it’s too
thick and that can lead to congestive heart failure.”
He added that enlarging of the left chamber’s walls typically takes
decades to develop, however. Usually, it affects people in their 70s
and 80s.
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Another recent study published in the Journal of the American
College of Cardiology found people who were obese and had high blood
pressure were more likely to grow up to have thicker walls in the
left chambers of the hearts.
Litwin wrote an editorial accompanying that study in the Journal of
the American College of Cardiology. The study was published by
researchers at Tulane University in New Orleans and three medical
institutions in China.
“The fact that these children today are starting to get high blood
pressure, maybe these people will be getting heart disease 20 to 30
years earlier,” Litwin said.
The changes in the heart do improve if people are able to lose
weight - particularly for adults who have bariatric or
weight-reduction surgery, he said, adding that those types of
surgeries are becoming more common for younger people.
“But there’s some other data that suggest that once someone has been
obese, they may carry some risk forward once they lose weight,” he
said. “There is a cumulative burden of high blood pressure and
cholesterol.”
Litwin said diet and exercise are involved with the types of heart
changes found in these studies.
“Certainly physical activity and fitness are associated with good
longevity,” he said. “Getting them to occur on a society wide basis,
that’s the challenge.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1F3JpzP JACC: Cardiovascular Imaging, online
October 8, 2014 and http://bit.ly/1wccTaA and http://bit.ly/1sZch8C
Journal of the American Heart Association, online October 14, 2014.
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