US children appear to be failing an important test — of their hearts, not minds.
New research from the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago shows that heart health is a concern for many long before adulthood because fewer than one third of children aged 2-19 years scored highly on the American Heart Association’s (AHA) checklist for ideal cardiovascular fitness.
“This study gives us a new baseline for children’s heart health in the United States,” said Amanda Perak, MD, pediatric cardiologist at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, Illinois, and a co-author of the study.
Perak and her colleagues published their findings June 29 in the journal Circulation.
The researchers identified 9888 children who completed the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey between 2013 and 2018. They analyzed the available data using the AHA’s Life’s Essential 8 — a 100-point assessment of eight predictors for measuring heart health, including sleep, nicotine exposure, and blood glucose.
Data for only three metrics were available for all children in the study: diet, physical activity, and body mass index. As children aged, more metrics were averaged to obtain the overall cardiovascular health score. For instance, cholesterol/lipid levels become available at age 6 years, and blood pressure can be measured starting at age 8 years.
Only 2.2% of children in the study had optimal heart health, according to the Life’s Essential 8 scoring system, which spans poor (0-49), moderate (50-79), and high (80-100). Fewer than 1 in 3 (29.1%) overall had high scores, and scores worsened with age.
In the 2- to 5-year age group, over half (56.5%) of the children had good heart health. However, only one third (33.5%) of 6- to 11-year-olds scored highly. Meanwhile, only 14% of adolescents had good heart scores, Perak’s group found.
Heart health scores based on diet were lowest for every age group. In the youngest age group, the average cardiovascular health (CVH) score was about 61. In the 12-9 years age group, however, the average CVH score decreased to 28.5, the lowest measured score for any group in the study.
With such worrisome diet scores for the 12- to 19-year-old group, public health policies need to focus on changes, like removing sugar-sweetened beverage options from schools, according to Joseph Mahgerefteh, MD, director of preventive cardiology at the Mount Sinai Kravis Children’s Heart Center, New York City. He added that parents and their children also have a role to play.
“Some of our teenagers forget they can drink water when they are thirsty, and it is not necessary to drink sugar-sweetened beverages for thirst,” Mahgerefteh, who was not involved in the study, told Medscape Medical News. “Fresh vegetable intake is so low to a degree that some of our patients refuse to have any type of vegetable in their diet.”
“As a physician community caring for these patients, we need to be much more aggressive with our counseling and referral of these patients,” added Barry Love, MD, director of the congenital cardiac catheterization program at the Mount Sinai Kravis Children’s Heart Center, New York City. “These youngsters will inevitably encounter the effect of these conditions – coronary artery disease and stroke — at a much earlier adult age.”
Perak, Mahgerefteh, and Love reported no relevant financial conflicts of interest.
Circulation. Published online June 29, 2022. Full text
Arianna Sarjoo is an intern at Medscape and biology major at Boston University.
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