THERE WAS encouraging news of success at tackling the problem of obesity in children, heart specialists at the European Society for Cardiology (ESC) meeting were told yesterday.
Prof Martin Wabitsch of the division of paediatric endocrinology and diabetes at the University of Ulm in Germany described how a year long intervention by primary school teachers has helped reduce body fat in 7- and 8-year-old children.
Some 1,000 children participated in the “Ulm Research on Metabolism, Research and Lifestyle in Children” study, which aimed to reduce the amount of time they watched TV and also motivated them to take physical exercise on an ongoing basis.
The children undertook five to seven minutes’ physical activity every day while in school.
Other aspects of the programme were incorporated into 29 different lesson units each week.
“Children in the intervention group showed an average relative reduction of body fat mass of 260 grams after the one-year programme,” Prof Wabitsch said.
In separate research, Prof Claudia Walther of the department of cardiology at the University of Leipzig looked at the effect of daily school exercise on 11- to 12-year-old boys and girls.
One group of children received daily school exercise lessons for a year; a second group continued with their regular two hours’ sport activities per week.
The percentage of overweight children in the group who undertook daily exercise dropped from 13 per cent to 9 per cent, while there was no change in the control group.
“The results of this trial demonstrate that a simple intervention like daily school exercise lessons has a positive influence on body mass index and exercise capacity,” Prof Wabitsch said.
Meanwhile, a programme aimed at reducing obesity levels in adolescents at 48 centres across Germany succeeded in reducing body mass index (BMI) readings in just over half of those who participated.
At the beginning of the programme some 49 per cent of teenagers were obese, with 37 per cent labelled as extremely obese. A quarter of students had high blood pressure while one-third had high cholesterol.
All were attending either inpatient or outpatient weight control programmes. Dr Ulrike Hoffmeister of the department of epidemiology at the University of Ulm told the meeting, “51 per cent of the subjects had at least one cardiovascular risk factor at the beginning, which decreased to 28 per cent at the end of the intervention”.