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New guidelines may mean earlier drug interventions for childhood obesity

The American Academy of Pediatrics has made a major update to its guidelines on childhood obesity.

The new guidelines warn that waiting to treat kids struggling with obesity could make things worse. Instead, physicians should consider starting medications around the age of 12.

Novant Pediatrician Dr. Soren Johnson says doctors have traditionally relied on treatments including behavior intervention, nutrition and counseling to address childhood obesity. 

“This set of guidelines is a little bit more aggressive in saying, ‘We really should think about using medicines that might help or at least consider it and discuss that with the family’ a little bit younger and a little bit more aggressively than we have in the past.”

Johnson says obesity has been linked to a variety of long-term adverse health impacts including diabetes, heart conditions and liver disease. More immediately though, he says obesity carries a stigma that can be harmful to children’s self-esteem.

The American Association of Pediatrics says obesity affects more than 14 million children and adolescents. 

 

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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