Childhood overweight: socio-economic inequalities and consequences for later cardiovascular health

The last few decades have seen a dramatic rise in the prevalence of overweight/obesity in children and adolescents. Being overweight or obese as a child poses considerable long-term risks, particularly for cardiovascular health. Historically, obesity was a disease of affluence. Today, both adults and children from lower socio-economic backgrounds tend to be more overweight in high-income settings. In this paper, I present analysis of three research questions using data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), a cohort of children born in the south west of England in 1991/2. Firstly, I review two previously published papers examining i) the age at which socioeconomic inequalities in adiposity emerge and ii) socio-economic inequalities in cardiovascular risk factors when the participants were age 10 years. And finally, I present new findings on the tracking of overweight/obesity across childhood and adolescence, and whether this differs across socio-economic groups. The findings show that socio-economic differences in adiposity and cardiovascular risk factors emerge at a much earlier age than in older generations. If children are overweight/obese at age 7, there is a low probability that they will return to a healthy weight by age 15, and this probability is lower in low socio-economic groups. Together, these findings suggest an urgent need to prevent obesity at an early age, particularly amongst disadvantaged groups, in order to prevent wide socio-economic differences in cardiovascular health in later life.