Dr. Sanaz Piran, an internal medicine resident at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario and her colleagues reviewed data on 3,630 children, ages 5 to 18, who took part in 26 studies in Australia, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway and the United States.
They say the primary prevention of heart disease should start in childhood.
The studies reviewed used noninvasive methods to measure arterial blood flow and the thickness of artery walls in children with and without heart disease risk factors and found that in many cases, children with heart disease risk factors showed early signs of atherosclerosis.
The researchers say the findings highlight the need for parents and doctors to prevent and treat cardiovascular risk factors in children.
They believe diet and exercise are especially important to curb the escalating problem of childhood obesity.
Piran says obesity puts children at risk for high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol levels and children are eating too much fatty and processed foods.
Piran advises that parents need to involve their kids in regular exercise activities and cut down on fatty meals, emphasizing healthy food such as vegetables, not smoke in the presence of children and, if there's a family history of high cholesterol, children need to have their cholesterol levels checked.
She says the very things advocated for adults apply to children and families need to adopt a family-oriented approach to cardiovascular prevention and to addressing the risk factors.
The study was presented at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association, in Chicago.
A 23-Year Survival Analysis of Prediagnostic BMI and Risk of Lethal Prostate Cancer
A team of Harvard scientists has peered into 23 years of health data on more than 22,000 physicians and concluded that men who are overweight or obese years before being diagnosed with prostate cancer are more likely to die of the disease than those who are of normal weight.
While no studies have definitively shown that obesity and/or higher Body Mass Index, or BMI, which measures body fat, increases the risk of developing prostate cancer, these studies showed that obese men at the time of diagnosis were more likely to have a cancer recurrence.
But according to Jing Ma, M.D., Ph.D., a researcher at the Brigham and Women's Hospital-based Channing Laboratory and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, few studies have focused on obesity and the risk of dying from prostate cancer.
In fact, she said, there is "considerable debate in the urology and cancer fields regarding whether rising PSA (Prostate Specific Antigen) is a good indicator for whether people will eventually die from prostate cancer or not."
Ma and her co-workers at Brigham and Women's Hospital and at the Harvard School of Public Health examined 23 years of data from the Physician's Health Study, which began in 1982 as a randomized, double-blind trial of aspirin and beta-carotene. More than 22,000 U.S. male physicians were recruited for the trial to study the role of aspirin and beta-carotene in preventing heart disease and cancer.
About 15,000 men provided blood samples at enrollment, along with information on their body weight and height, and their BMI was calculated. Approximately 99 percent of the original participants were tracked through questionnaires for 23 years, including cause of death.
By the end of 2005, 2,367 men had developed prostate cancer, while 265 died of the disease. They found that 39 percent of the participants were overweight and 3.4 percent were obese at the beginning of the study, and that higher BMI was positively associated with the risk of dying from prostate cancer. They also showed that the risk of dying from prostate cancer increased 8 percent for each point increase in BMI.
A person with a BMI of between 25 and 29.9 is considered overweight, whereas someone with a BMI of 30-plus is called obese. The physicians were in relatively good shape compared to the U.S. population in general. U.S. males between 50 and 69 are approximately 40 percent overweight and more than 30 percent are obese.
"It was surprising since it is a moderate association and the BMI was measured in 1982 and was on average eight to 10 years before developing prostate cancer," Ma said. "The beauty of the study is that we could factor out smoking at baseline, and tumor grade and stage didn't affect the trend."
"Some people might think that what they do today has little to do with cancer risk, especially for prostate cancer," Ma said, "and some individuals probably wouldn't believe that obesity has anything to do with prostate cancer. But we have found that if a man develops prostate cancer, being obese could put him at a higher risk of dying from the cancer. There is something many men can do about that."
She and her co-workers are exploring the underlying mechanisms that link being overweight and/or obese to prostate cancer progression. A better understanding of the risk factors that influence the disease's progression, said Ma, is imperative.
Prostate cancer is the most common type of cancer found in American men, other than skin cancer, and the third leading cause of cancer death in men. The American Cancer Society estimates that there will be about 234,460 new cases of prostate cancer in the United States in 2006, with approximately 27,350 deaths from the disease.
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