Losing a few pounds helps very obese kids' health

Girls exercise during a weight-losing summer camp in Shenyang, Liaoning province, August 3, 2009.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The bad news: Not all the benefits of a family weight management program for severely obese kids last longer than six months, according to a new study.

The good news: As long as kids keep some of the weight off, they still see health benefits for longer than six months.

"Modest weight loss is associated with real health benefits. That's the take-home message, it's worth doing," Dr. Marsha D. Marcus of the University of Pittsburgh, one of the authors of the study, told Reuters Health.

Programs that focus on families with the goal of promoting healthier eating habits and more physical activity have been shown to help obese children lose weight, Marcus and her team write in the journal Pediatrics.

While this weight loss is typically "modest"-from 5 to 20 percent of excess body weight-studies have shown that losing even a few pounds can improve health in overweight and obese children and adults.

There has been little research on these behavioral programs in severely obese children, the researchers add. To investigate, they recruited 192 children 8 to 12 years old and their families. On average, the children were heavier than 99 percent of US children of their age and gender.

At six months, the children assigned to the intervention-which included 20 group meetings and lifestyle coaching-had lost nearly 8 percent of their excess weight, on average, while weight had decreased by less than 1 percent for kids who didn't participate in the program.

Within a year, these differences in weight loss had disappeared.

The researchers also looked at other measures of weight and health: Children in the intervention group showed significant reductions in their waist size, systolic blood pressure (the top number in a blood pressure measurement), percent body fat and total body fat at six months that stuck around through 12 months.

These differences, however, were gone at 18 months.

"Intervention for these children has health benefits, but it has to be sustained over time. The treatment needs to be somehow continued," Marcus said in an interview. "The best way to do that at this point is unknown."

But clearly, she added, something must be done; the number of severely obese children is growing. Any successful approach must involve schools, families, the community, health policy makers, health care providers and more, she added. "No one thing is going to solve this problem."

SOURCE: Pediatrics, October 2009.