Obesity Rates In US Stabilize, But No improvement Among Minorities And Children

It’s mixed news on the obesity front for the US. Overall rates for adults have indeed stabilized, but childhood and minority obesity is rising.

It’s mixed news on the obesity front for the US. Overall rates for adults have indeed stabilized, but childhood and minority obesity is rising, according to a study in the journal Medical Decision Making, published by SAGE.

Using a novel simulation approach based on national data from 2000-2004 and validated against 2005-2006 data, the study looked at future projections for the distribution of body mass index in the United States. The research explored statistics for many categories of Americans based on gender, age and race, seeking to discover which overweight groups were the most likely to have stable, rising or lower rates of weight.

Projections reveal that obesity rates across all age categories for the adult US population will remain stable for the next 10 years. That positive report, however, is contrasted to less positive projections indicating that the following groups of Americans may have rising rates of overweight:

·                     Black young adults (age 18-39 years)

·                     Children -- mainly boys -- (ages 6-9)

·                     Black children (10 and over)

"The unprecedented rise in obesity among U.S. adults over the past two decades appears to have stabilized and will continue to remain stable over the next 10 years," said author Anirban Basu PhD, University of Chicago School of Medicine. "Levels of obesity, however, remain very high and we're particularly concerned with the increase in rates of overweight among 6-9 year-old children -- especially boys. As they age they could contribute again to the rise of adult obesity, so addressing these risks in early childhood is of utmost importance."

Childhood Obesity
Diseases that were ‘Adults only’ now have a special preference for children. The cause is no great mystery and we all know it -childhood obesity

Medical Decision Making (MDM) offers rigorous and systematic approaches to decision making that are designed to improve the health and clinical care of individuals and to assist with health policy development. It is the official journal of the Society for Medical Decision Making (www.smdm.org). The Journal presents theoretical, statistical, and modeling techniques and methods from a variety of disciplines, including decision psychology, health economics, clinical epidemiology, and evidence synthesis.
SAGE is a leading international publisher of journals, books, and electronic media for academic, educational, and professional markets.

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