[ti:US Doctors Offer New Guidelines on Children Obesity]
[al:Health & Lifestyle]
[ar:VOA]
[dt:2023-01-17]
[by:www.voase.cn]
[00:00.00]A new recommendation from the American Academy of Pediatrics, says doctors should treat childhood obesity aggressively.
[00:11.27]Obesity is a word used to describe severely overweight people.
[00:17.62]In the past, many doctors thought children would grow out of bad eating habits. 
[00:25.27]They used the method of "wait and see" to decide what to do. 
[00:31.37]But the new guidelines say obese children should undergo operations or take medications to reduce their weight.
[00:41.74]Both actions, the doctors' group said, should reduce the amount of food children can eat.
[00:49.56]The problem of being overweight affects over 14 million American children.
[00:57.30]Doctors say carrying extra weight often results in lifelong health problems. 
[01:04.01]Children can develop high blood pressure, diabetes and depression.
[01:09.69]The new guidelines recommend weight loss drugs for children as young as 12 and operations, or surgery, starting at 13.
[01:20.99]Ihuoma Eneli is a doctor who co-wrote the report containing the new guidelines. 
[01:28.01]Eneli disagrees with the old guidelines.
[01:31.23]She said, "waiting doesn't work." 
[01:34.36]She said doctors usually see "a continuation of weight gain and the likelihood that [children will] have obesity in adulthood."
[01:43.81]Eneli is the director of the Center for Healthy Weight and Nutrition at a hospital in Columbus, Ohio.
[01:52.04]She said the drugs or surgery should go along with life changes. 
[01:57.95]That means children need help choosing better foods and finding ways to exercise more.
[02:04.76]Dr. Sandra Hassink was the other doctor who wrote the report.
[02:10.57]She works for the American Academy of Pediatrics and is the medical director for the Institute for Healthy Childhood Weight. 
[02:20.67]Hassink said the report offers pediatricians a different way to think about obesity. 
[02:27.74]In the past, she said, doctors sometimes thought of obesity as a "personal problem," or failure.
[02:36.01]Children are considered obese if their body mass index, or BMI, is higher than 95 percent of children of the same age. 
[02:46.82]BMI is a measure of body size based on a person's height and weight.
[02:54.48]She said the weight loss tools described in the report should be thought of in the same way as other treatments for health problems. 
[03:04.13]She compared it to prescribing an inhaler for someone who has asthma.
[03:10.22]Asthma is a medical condition that causes people to have trouble breathing.
[03:16.07]An inhaler supplies medicine that opens a person's lungs. 
[03:21.20]In the same way, the drugs the doctors talk about in their guidelines help a person to eat less food, which will help them lose weight.
[03:33.29]Semaglutide is the drug described in the report.
[03:37.47]It started as a diabetes treatment. 
[03:41.63]But a version of semaglutide called Wegovy recently received approval as an obesity treatment for children 12 and older.
[03:52.92]The New England Journal of Medicine reported that teenagers have used the drug and reduced their BMI by an average of 16 percent.
[04:05.56]Dr. Claudia Fox is a weight management doctor at the University of Minnesota. 
[04:12.76]When Wegovy received approval in late December, she started prescribing it to teenagers.
[04:21.16]Fox said the drug helps her patients have a "possibility of even having an almost normal body mass index."
[04:32.37]She called the results "a whole different level of improvement," compared to other treatments.
[04:40.25]Justin Ryder is a doctor who researches obesity for a children's hospital in Chicago. 
[04:48.17]He said the drug helps the brain and the stomach communicate. 
[04:54.07]"And," he said, "helps you feel more full than you would be (without it)."
[05:00.49]While children are losing weight because of the drug, it is hard to get. 
[05:06.60]There are two reasons: there is a production shortage, and more doctors are offering it to their patients.
[05:16.31]Semaglutide is now popular because people on social media have lost weight using it.
[05:25.55]Some doctors, however, worry that not every overweight child is a good candidate for the drug. 
[05:33.28]Dr. Robert Lustig studies children's health at the University of California in San Francisco.
[05:41.43]He said he wants to be sure people do not prescribe the medication "willy-nilly."
[05:49.60]Dr. Stephanie Byrne is at the Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
[05:56.06]Byrne said she still wants to see more research on how semaglutide affects many different children.
[06:05.31]But, she said, she is glad pediatricians are starting to think differently about obesity.
[06:13.23]"I definitely think this is a realization that diet and exercise is not going to do it for a number of teens who are struggling with this," she said.
[06:26.43]I'm Dan Friedell.