TUESDAY, Nov. 11 (HealthDay News) -- Kids these days are 13 going on 45, at least when it comes to their arteries.

According to research presented Tuesday at the American Heart Association's annual scientific sessions in New Orleans, obese adolescents had arteries more representative of someone three decades older.

"These data further illustrate the potential detrimental effects of obesity and its related risk factors, particularly components of the metabolic syndrome, on cardiovascular disease in children," said Dr. Carl Lavie, medical director of cardiac rehabilitation and prevention director of the Stress Testing Laboratory at Ochsner Heart and Vascular Institute in New Orleans.

And even beyond the results of this study, said Dr. Catherine McNeal, an associate professor of internal medicine and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine and a pediatrician at Scott & White Hospital in Temple, "it is clear that obesity is a risk factor for the development of premature cardiovascular disease in youth."

According to one scoring measure, obesity in male adolescents is a greater risk factor for cardiovascular disease than smoking, McNeal noted.

Obesity and related health problems are a pressing issue in most countries.

"Certainly, there is considerable concern that there is an obesity epidemic in the U.S., including in our children who are becoming more sedentary, watching more and more TV, playing video games and on the computer as opposed to physical activity outside," Lavie said. "In fact, there is concern that if the current obesity epidemic continues [and it actually seems to be worsening], we will soon see an abrupt end to the steady improvement in life expectancy in the U.S."

Researchers at the University of Missouri Kansas City School of Medicine and Children's Mercy Hospital used ultrasound to measure the thickness of the inner walls of the carotid arteries, located in the neck, in 70 high-risk children aged 6 to 19.

Carotid artery intima-media thickness (CIMT) is a measure of atherosclerosis, or the fatty build-up within the arteries that can eventually choke the vessels, leading to a heart attack or stroke.

"Generally kids have much smaller CIMT than do adults, and this increases with age," Lavie explained. "In adults, CIMT has correlated with a risk of heart attack and stroke, so generally, it is well-recognized that having a thinner CIMT is preferable."

The average age of participants was 13, most were white, and about half were male. Fifty-seven percent had a body-mass index (BMI) above the 95th percentile for their age.

On average, participants' "vascular age," meaning the age at which this level of thickening would be normal, was three decades older than their chronological age.

Children who were obese and who had high triglyceride levels in the blood (triglycerides are a form of fat) were more likely to have advanced vascular age.

McNeal said it was worth noting that the study was a small one and lacked some statistical data, making her shy away from stating that the findings are conclusive.

In any case, researchers do need to explore whether losing weight and adopting healthier lifestyles could correct these problems. Other research indicates it could.

"The prevention of this starts prenatally, with educating mothers and fathers about the nutritional needs of raising an infant and a child," McNeal said. "Most young parents fail to understand the nutritional requirements of a child and fail to balance the caloric intake with energy expenditure. . . A study two years or so ago suggested that this generation of youth would be the first generation to not outlive their parents."

More information

Visit the Alliance for a Healthier Generation   for more on kids and heart disease.

THURSDAY, Nov. 6 (HealthDay News) -- Very young children who sustain a head injury may be more likely to be diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) later, researchers report.

The head injury is not a cause of ADHD, but rather a result of excessive risk-taking, according to the paper published in the Nov. 8 online edition of the British Medical Journal.

"There have been studies done that link moderate to severe traumatic brain injury in older children to ADHD," said lead researcher Dr. Heather Keenan, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. "There has been some suggestion that mild traumatic brain injury could also be linked to ADHD."

The researchers wanted to know whether or not head injury that occurs before the age of 2 might cause ADHD. A diagnosis of ADHD cannot be made before that age, Keenan noted.

"It is hard to figure this out, because we don't know whether or not the kids would have gone on to develop ADHD regardless of the head injury," Keenan said.

For the study, Keenan's group collected data on 62,088 children who were registered in a British health improvement network database. The researchers compared the children with head injuries to two other groups: children with a burn/scald injury before the age of 2, and all the other non-injured children.

"We wanted to make sure that if we saw a relationship between head injury and ADHD, it wasn't just that kids with early injuries were showing behavioral traits that would make them more likely to be diagnosed versus the head injury itself," Keenan said.

The researchers found that children with early head injury did have a 90 percent higher incidence of ADHD diagnosis before they were 10, compared with children in the general population. However, children with a scalding injury also had a higher risk of being diagnosed with ADHD, 70 percent to be exact. "Therefore, the head injury did not appear to cause the ADHD," Keenan said.

Keenan thinks this finding may mean that some very young children are already showing behavioral traits that are the hallmarks of ADHD.

"Children with early injury should receive routine developmental and behavioral surveillance by their pediatrician, as well as injury prevention counseling," Keenan said. "Early injury may be an indicator of attention problems in some children."

Dr. Jon A. Shaw, director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Miami, agreed that early injury may signal a future diagnosis of ADHD.

"The finding that head injury or burn injury occurring before 2 years of age are equal risk factors for a diagnosis of ADHD before 10 years of age is a surprising, but interesting, finding," Shaw said.

ADHD is a highly heritable disease. Approximately 85 percent of ADHD children have a family history of ADHD, Shaw said. "Children with ADHD are impulsive, hyperactive, distractible and inattentive, and are accident-prone, and thus more likely to put themselves at risk for injury," he said.

More information

For more information on ADHD, visit the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health.

MONDAY, Nov. 3 (HealthDay News) -- Medication use among children across the United States is dramatically increasing as more kids are being treated for diabetes, asthma and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), researchers report.

Increased prescribing may be due in large part to increasing obesity among children and the health consequences of that trend, researchers say.

"Across all the medication classes we looked at, the rates of use increased -- sometimes dramatically," said study co-author Dr. Donna Halloran, an assistant professor of pediatrics at St. Louis University. "This is particularly concerning, given that several of these diagnoses have been linked to obesity -- diabetes, hypertension, depression, asthma."

The report was published in the November issue of Pediatrics.

For the study, Halloran's team looked at medication use among U.S. children from 2002 to 2005. Using a database of prescription claims from children with private health insurance, they were able to find prescriptions for almost 4 million children.

The researchers found that over four years, prescriptions for children aged 5 to 19 increased significantly. Among two drugs to treat type 2 diabetes, the use doubled. This increase was due to a 166 percent increase in prevalence of the disease among girls aged 10 to 14, and a 135 percent increase in prevalence among girls age 15 to 19.

In addition, the use of drugs to treat asthma rose by 46.5 percent, and the use of drugs to treat ADHD grew by 40.4 percent. The number of prescriptions for cholesterol-lowering drugs rose by 15 percent, the researchers found.

Halloran's group also found more modest increases in the use of blood pressure drugs and antidepressants (1.8 percent).

The increased rate of prescribing was much higher for girls than boys. For example, the use of drugs to treat type 2 diabetes increased 147 percent among girls, but only 39 percent among boys.

The use of drugs to treat ADHD increased 63 percent among girls and 33 percent among boys, and the use of antidepressants rose 7 percent among girls compared with 4 percent among boys.

"Whether the increased use of medications is a good thing really depends on your perspective," said study co-author Emily R. Cox, manager of outcomes research at Express Scripts Inc., in St. Louis. "Most people who would look at these numbers would indicate that these are worrisome trends."

"We need to understand what is driving this increase," Cox said. "Really, these are symptoms of underlying problems."

As the number of obese children increases, the number of children with chronic diseases is also increasing, Cox said. "That they are being treated is a good thing," she said. "The concern is, are doctors more likely to use drug therapy over diet and exercise?"

Dr. Michael Artman, head of the department of pediatrics at the University of Iowa, is concerned that children with chronic health problems who have private health insurance are getting better care than similar children who rely on government programs or who have no health insurance.

"I can imagine that the need is as great or even greater among disadvantaged children," Artman said. "We know the prevalence of those chronic conditions in disadvantaged socioeconomic classes is greater. This is kind of the tip of the iceberg in children's prescribing."

Artman also noted there is more data on prescribing medications to children, which makes doctors more confident in prescribing and means that children are getting better care.

"Now we actually have data on drug effects and side effects and toxicity and efficacy in children that we didn't have two or three decades ago," he said. "This is an important advance in pediatric medicine."

More information

For more about obesity in children, visit the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

FRIDAY, Oct. 24 (HealthDay News) -- A molecule called CCR10 plays an important role in a mother's ability to pass along immunity to intestinal infections to her baby through breast-feeding, according to a U.S. study involving mice.

The team from Brigham Young, Harvard and Stanford universities found that normal lactating mice had hundreds of thousands of antibody-producing cells in their mammary glands, while mice without CCR10 had 70 times fewer such cells. The absence of CCR10 was the reason for that deficiency.

The study was published in the Nov. 1 issue of The Journal of Immunology.

"Everybody hears that breast-feeding is good for the baby," study author Eric Wilson, an assistant professor of microbiology at Brigham Young, said in a university news release. "But why is it good? One of the reasons is that mothers' milk carries protective antibodies which shield the newborn from infection, and this study demonstrates the molecular mechanisms used by the mother's body to get these antibody-producing cells where they need to be."

Learning more about CCR10 may prove valuable in future efforts to help mothers better protect their babies.

"This [study] tells us that this molecule is extremely important, so if we want to design a vaccine for the mother so she could effectively pass protective antibodies to the child, it would be absolutely essential to induce high levels of CCR10," Wilson said.

"The molecular basis for this redistribution [of the mother's antibody-producing cells] has not been well-characterized, but Dr. Wilson's work has begun to crack that code and define the molecules responsible for this cellular redistribution and passive immunity," Daniel Campbell, a researcher at the Benaroya Research Institute in Seattle, a nonprofit organization that specializes in the immune system, said in the news release.

"It is important work that fundamentally enhances our understanding of how immunity is provided to the [baby] via the milk. Dr. Wilson's study will certainly form the basis for many other studies aimed at uncovering how the immune system is organized, particularly at mucosal surfaces."

More information

The National Women's Health Information Center has more about the benefits of breast-feeding.