Increasing Trends in Obesity-Related Cardiovascular Risk Factors in Romanian Children and Adolescents—Retrospective Study

Abstract

Childhood obesity has become a global public health issue and its assessment is essential, as an obese child is a future overweight or obese adult. Obesity is no longer a matter of exercising more and eating less, with several factors coming into play and dictating the pattern of fat accumulation and the ease/difficulty of reducing it. In the current paper, we aimed to analyze the cardiovascular impact of obesity in a large number of patients alongside the paraclinical changes that occur due to weight gain, and to perform an analysis on the increase in prevalence throughout our research. The main cardiovascular conditions identified were hypertension (15.36%), septal or concentric hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (11.15%), atherosclerosis risk (13.04%), and hypercholesterolemia (20.94%). We have used echocardiography to measure the thickness of epicardial adipose tissue (useful for assessing the patient’s cardiovascular risk), and we observed that it was greater in children with moderate and severe obesity alongside diastolic dysfunction of the left ventricle in the whole group, without any connection with hypertension or coronary impairment. Obese children will be affected by increased cardiovascular mortality and morbidity in adulthood and they may experience early cardiovascular dysfunction. We want to strongly underline the importance and necessity of programs for the early detection and prevention of obesity and its complications, especially since interesting phenomena such as the “obesity paradox” exist and prove that obesity is far less understood than it is at a first glance.