A new study has found that children who are either very thin or very obese have a higher risk of poor lung function. The study was published in the European Respiratory Journal and was conducted by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. The study provides another reason why it is important for your child to reach and maintain a healthy weight.

According to a report in US News, however, the results of the study showed that if their weight can be normalized before they reach adulthood, this loss can be compensated for.

“This highlights how important it is to optimize children’s development early in life and throughout their early school years and adolescence,” said Dr. Eric Mellen, professor of pediatrics at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and lead investigator of the study. How important it is.”

The researchers report in background notes that about 1 in 10 children develop reduced lung function during childhood, and as a result, they do not achieve maximum lung capacity as adults. This increases their risk of serious health problems like heart disease, lung disease and diabetes.

For the study, researchers tracked 3,200 children from birth to age 24. During that period, the children’s BMI was measured between four and 14 times. “In this study, the largest to date, we have been able to follow children from birth to age 24,” said Gang Wang, principal investigator and postdoctoral researcher in clinical sciences and education at Karolinska Institutet. “Which includes the entire period of lung function development.”

Researchers found that children ranged from being very thin, normal weight, or very obese by age 2. Lung function was measured at ages 8, 16 and 24 to gauge the children’s airway development, the researchers said.

The study results showed that, unlike children with normal BMI, children with high or increasing BMI had impaired lung function as adults, which was primarily the result of restricted airflow in the lungs.

“Interestingly, we found that in the group with initially high BMI but normalized BMI before puberty, lung function was not impaired in adulthood,” Meylen said in a Karolinska news release.

Increased levels of metabolites of the essential amino acid histidine were also observed in urine samples from children with higher BMI. A similar pattern has been observed in patients with asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

“We see objective biomarkers here for the correlation we found, even though we don’t yet know exactly the molecular relationship between high BMI, histidine and impaired lung development,” Mellen said.

But low BMI was also associated with reduced lung function, in that case, due to inadequate lung development, the researchers found. “The focus has been on overweight, but we also need to capture children with low BMI and offer nutritional interventions,” Wang said.

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