• Posted January 28, 2025

Weight Loss Boosts Long-Term Health of Kids With Obesity

Helping kids with obesity drop pounds can have a huge impact on their future health.

When these children and teens lose weight, they are less likely to have type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and elevated cholesterol as young adults, researchers reported in a new study published Jan. 21 in JAMA Pediatrics.

They also had a lower risk of dying young, their results show.

“The results are very good news,” senior researcher Emilia Hagman, a docent of clinical science, intervention and technology at Karolinska Institute in Sweden, said in a news release.

“Whether or not the treatment of obesity in childhood has long-term health benefits have been debated, since weight-loss is hard to maintain,” she said. “This emphasizes the importance of providing early treatment, as we know that timely intervention increases the likelihood of success and helps mitigate the long-term health risks associated with obesity.”

For the study, researchers analyzed data on more than 6,700 Swedish children who registered for obesity treatment between 1996 and 2019.

All received at least one year of obesity treatment prior to age 18. On average, the kids started treatment at age 12 and received around three years of treatment, researchers report.

The research team then checked in with the children as they reached adulthood -- between 18 to 30 years of age -- to see whether losing weight had helped some.

About 1,070 children had a good response to their weight-loss treatment, and another 1,500 lost enough weight that they were no longer considered obese, researchers found.

Compared to kids who didn’t lose weight, those children with a good response had a:

• 58% lower risk of type 2 diabetes.

• 69% lower risk of high cholesterol.

• 58% lower risk of requiring bariatric surgery.

Children who lost enough weight to no longer be considered obese had similar reductions in risk, and also experienced a 60% lower risk of high blood pressure, researchers report.

Obesity remission or a good response to weight treatment also came with a 88% lower risk of early death, results show.

“Beneficial treatment response in pediatric obesity treatment had enduring positive effects in young adulthood,” researchers concluded in their report.

Unfortunately, losing weight had no affect on future risk of depression and anxiety, researchers found. No matter how a kid responded to obesity treatment, their risk for a mood disorder remained unchanged in young adulthood.

“It has been believed that weight loss could decrease symptoms of depression and anxiety, but we can now show that it’s not the case,” Hagman said. “Even though there’s a link between the two comorbidities, they must be treated in parallel.”

Hagman said doctors might want to consider prescribing GLP-1 weight loss drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound to children with obesity, based on these results. Those drugs are rarely used in children.

“I’m in favor of their use as these drugs eases feelings of hunger, which is something that some children struggle with,” Hagman concluded. “That said, lifestyle therapy is still the foundation of all treatments for childhood obesity.”

The study was funded by Novo Nordisk, the manufacturer of Ozempic/Wegovy.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on childhood obesity.

SOURCE: Karolinska Institute, news release, Jan. 21, 2025