July 5, 2005 CHICAGO (AP) -- A respected medical panel is urging pediatricians not to focus only on height and weight in determining whether a child is too fat.
Leading groups of family doctors and pediatricians endorse routine screening using the height-weight ratio of the body-mass index. But there's no evidence that all children with high BMIs need to lose weight to be healthy -- and there's no evidence that pediatricians' weight counseling results in weight loss and better health, according to a report from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a non-governmental panel of researchers.
The report comes amid growing concern over how to stem the nation's rising obesity. Some 15 percent of U.S. schoolchildren are estimated to be obese, and 30 percent are believed to be overweight.
BMI can be fairly effective at identifying children who likely have weight problems, said task force member Dr. Virginia Moyer. But it can't determine if body mass is mostly fat or lean tissue, and not all children with high BMIs need to lose weight, said Moyer, a pediatrics professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston.
She recommended doctors investigate rapid increases in weight that are not accompanied by increases in height. "The weak link is we don't know what to do about it," she said in a telephone interview.
The report "should be read as a call to action for the pediatric scientific community," Moyer and other task force members said in an article accompanying the report in July's Pediatrics, published Tuesday. The article says more conclusive research is needed into what works to identify and treat overweight children in a doctor's-office setting.
Dr. Nancy Krebs, co-chair of an American Academy of Pediatrics' obesity panel, said some pediatricians might misinterpret the report and give up fighting the obesity epidemic, figuring there's nothing they can do to help.
"The report doesn't say the BMI is not useful. It concludes that the evidence isn't there yet to say whether or not it is," said Krebs, a pediatrics professor at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.
While the report notes it will take more than doctor visits to fight childhood obesity, it suggests pediatricians have the community stature to help lobby for changes that could help. Those include schools requiring more physical activity and changes in community land use to create more exercise space, said Dr. Evelyn Whitlock, of Portland, Ore., who led a research group that prepared background information for the task force report.
Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
