Obesity is prevalent in children and is associated with increased risk of adult obesity. The importance of treating childhood obesity and preventing these children from becoming obese adults is underscored by the poor treatment results with adults. Most programs produce small losses, and maintenance is poor.
Obesity runs in families. Garn and Clark showed that children from two obese parents (defined by triceps skin folds) had skin folds that were two to three times as thick as children of two lean parents, depending on the child's age and sex. Skin-fold values increased with age for children of obese parents, with the values for girls being higher than those for boys.
Parental weight may add to the relative risk of an obese child becoming an obese adult. Overweight infants (greater than the seventy-fifth percentile for weight) are more likely to become obese adults if their parents are obese than if their parents are nonobese. Fifty-one percent of the overweight infants with one or two obese parents became obese adults, compared to 20 percent of the obese infants with thin parents, a relative risk of 2.5. Thin infants, whether or not they had obese parents, were at lower risk for becoming obese adults, since less than 20 percent of nonoverweight children became overweight adults.
Other studies have examined the relationship of a child's weight to weights of other family members. Garn and associates assessed the probability of a family member in a four-member nuclear family being obese given the weight status of the other family members. If all other family members were lean, 3.2 percent of the boys and 5.4 percent of the girls were obese. If the remaining family members were obese, then 27.5 per cent of the boys and 24.1 percent of the girls were obese. The relative risks for boys or girls were 8.6 and 4.7..............
