Obesity, body fat distribution, and ambulatory blood pressure in children and adolescents.

Obesity is a common disease with an ever-increasing prevalence and usually with late-onset consequences. If acquired during childhood, it tracks into adult life to some extent, and since the relationship between obesity and hypertension is well established in adults, obese children appear to be at particularly high risk of becoming hypertensive adults. In the authors' study, obese children seemed to have significantly higher casual and ambulatory blood pressure than nonobese children, except for nighttime diastolic blood pressure. The health effects of obesity may depend on the anatomic distribution of body fat, which in turn may be a better indicator of endocrinologic imbalance, environmental stress, or genetic factors than is fatness per se. Subjects with a higher waist-to-hip ratio or a larger waist, as an estimate of central obesity, tend to have higher blood pressure values even during childhood. Prevention of the onset of obesity in early life may be important to reducing the risk of coronary heart disease in later life.