Child Obesity Risks Death at Early Age

In this article from the New York Times the author talks about a rare study done that tracked thousands of children through adulthood. The study predicted that: the heaviest children were more than twice as likely to die prematurely (before the age of 55) of illness or self-inflicted injury. Children with pre-diabetic symptoms were almost at double the risk of dying before age 55. And children with high blood pressure were at some increased risk. The information was gathered from Pima and Tohono O'odham Indians, who have always had high rated of obesity and type 2 diabetes. So they did a new study using about 4,857 non diabetic American Indians born between 1945 and 1984, when the children were on average 11 years old. They measured their body mass index, glucose tolerance, blood pressure, and total cholesterol levels, to see if they truly could predict a pre mature death. By 2003 559 of the participants had died, 166 of which were causes other than accidents and homicides, such as, cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and alcoholic liver disease. The adults with the highest BMI scores as children were 2.3 times as likely to have died prematurely, and those that measured in with the highest glucose levels were 73% more likely to have died early.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/health/11fat.html