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Obesity is a growing health problem, especially in the young, as it increases the risk for future diseases such as infections and heart disease and maintaining weight loss is very difficult. However, starting treatment at a young age might be the most ideal. Most knowledge on obesity and its related health risks are based on studies in adults, but we don’t know whether obesity in children and adults is the same. From adults, it is known that people with obesity have more inflammation. It is currently unknown if this is also true for children, which makes treatment strategies more difficult and less personalized.
Researchers Siroon Bekkering, together with Niels Riksen and Mihai Netea from the Radboudumc internal medicine department and her collaborators from the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne, Australia, wanted to find out more about this. As a visiting researcher in Melbourne, Siroon compared blood samples from children with obesity and children without obesity to look at inflammation in both groups. In addition, the children with obesity were treated in the weight management clinic in the Royal Children’s Hospital and followed for a minimum of 5 years. After that, they came back for a cardiovascular exam, to study their cardiovascular health at early adulthood and they donated another blood sample.
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What the researchers found, is that similar as in adults, children with obesity have higher inflammation. Their immune cells are more responsive and at the same time, they are less effective in a response against viruses. Also, when inflammation at the first visit was higher, their cardiovascular health 5 years later was worse, indicating that inflammation might be a good treatment target. At the moment, followup studies are conducted with other collaborators in Brisbane, Australia, to study more in-depth how the immune cells can be more responsive and less effective against viruses at the same time. This might help lower infectious risk in later life for these children suffering from obesity. The results are published in iScience on May 17, 2024.
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Read the publication here: https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(24)00984-2
Bekkering S, Saner C et al. Increased innate immune responses in adolescents with obesity and its relation to subclinical cardiovascular measures: An exploratory study. iScience, 2024, 27(5);
