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Adiposity and carotid-intima media thickness in children and adolescents: a systematic review

Park, MH; Skow, A; De Matteis, S; Kessel, AS; Saxena, S; Viner, RM; Kinra, S; (2015) Adiposity and carotid-intima media thickness in children and adolescents: a systematic review. BMC Pediatrics , 15 , Article 161. 10.1186/s12887-015-0478-5. Green open access

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Abstract

BACKGROUND: Adiposity in childhood is associated with later cardiovascular disease (CVD), but it is unclear whether this relationship is independent of other risk factors experienced in later life, such as smoking and hypertension. Carotid-intima media thickness (cIMT) is a measure of subclinical atherosclerosis that may be used to assess CVD risk in young people. The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between adiposity and cIMT in children and adolescents. METHODS: We searched Medline, Embase, Global Health, and CINAHL Plus electronic databases (1980–2014). Population-based observational studies that reported a measure of association between objectively-measured adiposity and cIMT in childhood were included in this review. RESULTS: Twenty-two cross-sectional studies were included (n = 7,366 children and adolescents). Thirteen of nineteen studies conducted in adolescent populations (mean age ≥12 years, n = 5,986) reported positive associations between cIMT and adiposity measures (correlation coefficients 0.13 to 0.59). Three studies of pre-adolescent populations (n = 1,380) reported mixed evidence, two studies finding no evidence of a correlation, and one an inverse relationship between skinfolds and cIMT. Included studies did not report an adiposity threshold for subclinical atherosclerosis. CONCLUSIONS: Based on studies conducted mostly in Western Europe and the US, adiposity does not appear to be associated with cIMT in pre-adolescents, but may be associated in adolescents. If further studies confirm these findings, a focus on cardiovascular disease prevention efforts in pre-adolescence, before arterial changes have emerged, may be justified.

Type: Article
Title: Adiposity and carotid-intima media thickness in children and adolescents: a systematic review
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1186/s12887-015-0478-5
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12887-015-0478-5
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © 2015 Park et al. Open Access: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
Keywords: Science & Technology, Life Sciences & Biomedicine, Pediatrics, Childhood obesity, Carotid intima-media thickness, Cardiovascular risk, Body-mass Index, Coronary-heart-disease, Risk-factors, Cardiovascular Risk, Blood-pressure, Healthy-children, Obese Children, Swedish Men, Middle-age, Association
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > UCL GOS Institute of Child Health
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > UCL GOS Institute of Child Health > Population, Policy and Practice Dept
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1501092
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