Welcome to InCirculation.net
InCirculation.net is a professional cardiovascular resource intended for a global audience of specialists, generalists, researchers, and other healthcare professionals
Cardiovascular news provides daily news updates to help you stay informed.
Immigrant children at increased metabolic syndrome risk
1 August 2008
MedWire News: Overweight children living in Norway are more likely to have the metabolic syndrome if they come from immigrant rather than native Norwegian families, show findings from the Oslo Adiposity Intervention Study.
"This suggests that ethnic minorities may have an increased sensitivity to adiposity and need more aggressive prevention and treatment than their Norwegian counterparts," the researchers observe in the journal Acta Paediatrica.
Magnhild Pollestad Kolsgaard (Ullevaal University Hospital, Oslo, Norway) and colleagues studied 203 overweight or obese children, aged 6-17 years, who had been referred to the long-term Oslo Adiposity Intervention Study.
In all, 120 children were Norwegian, 40 were Pakistani, 16 were Tamil, and 27 were Turkish. Most of the immigrant children were second generation.
At referral, the Norwegian children were slightly older on average than the immigrant children, at 11.9 versus 10.8 years.
After accounting for age and gender, Norwegian children were taller than their immigrant counterparts, at 156 versus 149 cm, but other variables, including body mass index (BMI) did not differ.
In all, 30.6% of immigrant children had the metabolic syndrome, compared with 20.8% of Norwegian children. The difference was significant after accounting for age, gender, and BMI Z-score, with immigrant children 2.2 times more likely to have the metabolic syndrome than their Norwegian peers.
No single metabolic syndrome component accounted for this difference, with immigrant and Norwegian children equally likely to have obesity, high blood pressure, low levels of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, elevated triglycerides, and high plasma glucose levels.
The researchers caution that their metabolic syndrome definition does not account for ethnic variability. However, they report that use of ethnic-specific definition proposed by other investigators only served to widen the gap, with the immigrant children 3.9 times more likely to have the metabolic syndrome than the Norwegian children.
