Hospital leads way in helping to curb child obesity

A Shanghai hospital is leading a 5-year Sino-Canadian program aiming at the prevention of child obesity.

The Shanghai-based International Peace Maternity and Child Health Hospital of China Welfare Institute is working in cooperation with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Led by the Shanghai hospital, the program will carry out clinical researches on child obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular and other non-communicable diseases to set up a new comprehensive intervening model involving community, family, mother and children in accordance with China's health system, the hospital announced yesterday.

Previous researches have proved obesity is closely related to the occurrence and development of non-communicable diseases, such as cardiovascular problems, cancers, chronic respiratory diseases and diabetes.

The number of Chinese teenagers aged between 7 and 18 has soared since 1985. In 2000 about 11.7 percent of boys and 6.8 percent of girls were found to be overweight or obese, up 19.5 times and 7.6 times respectively in 15 years.

Prevention of child obesity has become a key issue in China, said the hospital.

"Besides expectant mothers' pre-pregnancy body mass index, smoking and excessive weight gain during pregnancy, as well as high birth weight and fast weight gain of babies, many researches have found that nutrition in infant period, environmental pollution and gender also have a big influence on occurrence of children's overweight and obesity," said Huang Hefeng from the Shanghai international peace hospital, who is the leader of the program.

Co-funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China and Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the program will study intervening measures throughout the whole process of pre-pregnancy, pregnancy, infant and toddler periods to prevent diseases with developmental origins, said Huang.

The program will build up a resource platform for international cooperation in studying overweight and obesity problems.