"Nationally representative data do not show any significant changes in obesity prevalence in the most recently available years ... unfortunately, there is an upward trend of more severe forms of obesity, and further investigations into the causes of and solutions to this problem are needed," Skinner and co-author Joseph Skelton, MD, of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., said.
The analysis was one of two studies examining pediatric obesity published this week. A second study in the May Pediatrics suggested that, over the course of a lifetime, higher medical costs associated with childhood obesity average about $19,000 per person, and extra costs average about $12,900 per person when normal-weight children become overweight or obese during adulthood.
"To put these findings in perspective, multiplying the lifetime medical cost estimate of $19,000 times the number of obese 10-year-olds today generates a total direct medical cost of obesity of roughly $14 billion for this age alone," wrote Eric Andrew Finkelstein, PhD, from the Duke Global Health Institute at Duke University, and colleagues.Extrapolating the $14 billion cost of higher medical costs associated with obese 10-year-olds over their lifetimes to other age groups results in an even more staggering figure.
