Evidence suggests that the development of adult Western diseases such as obesity, metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular disease may have their roots in the health of the individual during childhood. This is unsurprising as many of these conditions take decades to manifest as physiological changes that can be recognised in clinical tests. Both a high and low body weight during childhood in turn may be linked to the nutritional state of not just the child but also the mother during pregnancy. For example, some evidence suggests that high blood pressure in adult life may be associated with a high or low body weight for age during childhood. Low body weight infants that are small for their gestational age can be exposed to over nutrition in order to catch-up with their peers weight, and this may overload the ability of their liver to process nutrients and thus sow the seeds of future metabolic dysfunction. Maintaining correct body weight when in childhood may therefore be advantageous to adult health.
Researchers1 have investigated the association between growth during childhood and the blood pressure measurements in adulthood in Indian subjects. Adult subjects over 20 years old who lived in rural India had previously had their anthropometric measurements taken during early childhood as part of a previous cohort study. The subjects had their blood pressure measured and the researchers analysed the data for associations between childhood body weight and blood pressure elevations in adulthood. The researchers reported that those subjects with the highest body mass indexes as children and adolescent were the same subjects who had the highest blood pressure as adults. In addition, high diastolic pressure in adults was particularly associated with stunted grown at age 3 or over or with high body mass indexes (above 25 kg/m2) before adulthood. Therefore, having a normal weight during childhood and early adulthood was associated with normal blood pressure in later life.
The researchers noted that at 24 years of age, 33.9 % of the men had systolic blood pressure over 130 mmHg or diastolic blood pressure over 85 mmHg despite the absence of obesity. This supports other data to show that metabolic syndrome, characterised by abdominal obesity, can develop even in those who do not show signs of excessive subcutaneous fat deposition. It is also concerning that 24 year old men in rural communities of India are developing Western style disease such as high blood pressure. This may reflect changes to the food supply, whereby Western style refined carbohydrates are increasingly being consumed. In addition, previous research has shown that a birth weight of less than 3050 grams can cause an individual to become salt sensitive and have elevation in blood pressure with increasing salt intake up to 10 grams per day (here). Therefore low birth weight infants, as well as those with high body mass indices may be at risk of future blood pressure elevations.
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