New research demonstrated that extreme obesity is affecting more children at younger ages, affecting more than one in ten black teenage girls, hispanic teenage boys, and 7.3 percent of boys and 5.5 percent of girls.
A Kaiser Permanente study of 710,949 children and teens detailed the findings in Journal of Pediatrics.
The study is the first of its kind to provide a snapshot of the prevalence of extreme obesity in a contemporary cohort of children ages 2 – 19 years from a large racially and ethnically diverse population using the recent 2009 U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention extreme obesity definition.
Previous research was based on recent National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) data and included information on obesity but not extreme obesity.
Read more about the study.
