Severe obesity in U.S. children has skyrocketed since 2008

The proportion of severely overweight children in the U.S. has skyrocketed in recent years, with the highest rates seen in adolescents and Black children, a new study found.

Roughly 23% of all children were obese in 2023, up from 19% in 2008, according to the survey published this month in JAMA Network Open. Additionally, more than 1% of children between the ages of 2 and 18 had “extremely severe obesity” — a 250% increase from the start of the study, the researchers from UC San Diego found.

Phillipp Hartmann, the study’s corresponding author, said he hopes the results lead to more trials that test the benefits of powerful weight loss drugs called GLP-1s for children and adolescents with severe obesity.

“It might be reasonable in those patients to have the weight loss medications very early,” he said in an interview.

Medical professionals may be open to broadening the use of the popular weight loss drugs to treat obesity and diabetes in ever-younger patients. The Food and Drug Administration has approved only semaglutide, the main ingredient in Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic and Wegovy, for children 12 and older. But weight-loss medicines have been tested on kids as young as 6.

Severe obesity also came with a higher risk of other health complications, such prediabetes and diabetes, severe insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome — a cluster of conditions that can increase the chance of heart disease and stroke.

The results were based on information from more than 25,000 children gathered as part of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which is managed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Center for Health Statistics.

Amponsah writes for Bloomberg.