Obese children have psoriasis risk

Overweight or obese children have an elevated rate of psoriasis and teens with psoriasis have elevated cholesterol regardless of weight, U.S. researchers say.

Lead author Corinna Koebnick, a research scientist at Kaiser Permanente Southern California's Department of Research & Evaluation in Pasadena, Calif., says psoriasis is a chronic inflammatory disease of the skin that often starts early in life and affects more than 7 million Americans.

"This study suggests a link between obesity and psoriasis in children," Koebnick says in a statement. "But our study findings also suggest that the higher heart disease risk for patients with psoriasis starts in childhood in the form of higher cholesterol levels. We may need to monitor youth with psoriasis more closely for cardiovascular risk factors, especially if they are obese."

The study using electronic health records to study 710,949 racially and ethnically diverse children, published in the Journal of Pediatrics, found overweight children were almost 40 percent more likely than normal weight children to have psoriasis, while extremely obese children were almost 80 percent more likely than normal weight children to have psoriasis.

Among youth with psoriasis, it was four times more likely that the psoriasis would be severe or more widespread in obese youth than what was seen in normal weight children, the study says.

Additionally, teens with psoriasis had 4 percent to 16 percent higher cholesterol levels and liver enzymes, regardless of their weight, than youth without this psoriasis, Koebnick says.

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Obesity Damages Our Brains as Well as Our Bodies

Obesity is not only bad for our bodies, but being overweight appears also to diminish our brain's ability to think, remember and reason, Science News reported.

Researchers from Kent State University in Ohio tested the cognitive functions of obese volunteers and compared them with healthy people. In general, the obese participants' scores were lower than their healthy counterparts. In some of the tests, including on memory exams, nearly 25 percent of the obese participants scored low enough to be considered learning disabled.

After the initial tests, two-thirds of the obese participants underwent weight loss surgery and lost, on average, 50 pounds in three months. In a second round of tests, the group that lost weight boosted their scores, including their memory test scores, significantly. This was not true for the group that did not lose weight.

This is not the first time scientists have made a connection between health and cognitive function.

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Obesity Rates Growing in America

Obesity rates in the United States keep rising year after year, despite all warnings and campaigns from the government. About 30+ percent of Americans were obese in nine states last year, as opposed to only three states in 2007, health officials reported on Tuesday. The increases mean that 2.4 million more people became obese from 2007 to 2009, bringing the total to 72.5 million, or 26.7 percent of the population. 

Researchers blame little exercise and too much of the wrong kind of food, which means not enough fruits and vegetables and too many high-calorie meals full of sugar and fat.

The nine states with obesity rates of 30 percent or more are Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee and West Virginia.

Source: NYTimes