Overweight and obesity in children and adolescents. A challenge for medicine and society

The prevalence of overweight and obesity in children and adolescents has markedly increased during the last two decades. In Germany, some 15% of 3-17 year olds are overweight and 6.3% are obese. Childhood obesity induces high levels of psychosocial burdens and a severe reduction in quality of life and life expectancy. Therapeutic options in obese children are less than satisfactory at present. Drug treatment is hardly used in obese children and bariatric surgery is limited to a few cases of older adolescents with morbid obesity. The usual behavioral therapy requires considerable investment of personnel and funds. Evidence-based, structured training programs over at least 1 year are currently funded only to a limited extent. Low threshold, low cost training programs which can easily be widely applied can contribute to reducing the body mass index in children with moderate degrees of overweight and without associated complications. Examples are the multimodal training programs PowerKids and TigerKids, which induce an effective, gradual BMI reduction.