Journal of Obesity & Weight Loss Therapy
Open Access

Review Article

Left Ventricular Hypertrophy in Obese Children

Rahaf Z Attar¹ and Osama Y Safdar^2*

¹College of Medicine, King Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia

²Pediatric Department, Faculty of Medicine, King Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia

*Corresponding Author:

Osama Safdar
Department of Pediatrics
Faculty of Medicine
King Abdulaziz University P.O. Box 80215
Jeddah 21589, Saudi Arabia
Tel: +996-5056-20849
Fax: +996-2-6655728
E-mail: safderosama@hotmail.com

Received February 16 2016; Accepted April 21, 2016; Published April 24, 2016

Citation: Attar RZ, Safdar OY (2016) Left Ventricular Hypertrophy in Obese Children. J Obes Weight Loss Ther 6:309. doi:10.4172/2165-7904.1000309

Copyright: © 2016 Attar RZ, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Childhood obesity is one of the most troubling health conditions worldwide, and it is associated with many diseases that eventually lead to serious morbidities and mortality in adulthood, such as insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes mellitus, high blood pressure, dyslipidemia, obstructive sleep apnea and subsequent renal, and liver and cardiovascular diseases. Cardiovascular disease carries the most risk of all of the long-term outcomes of obesity because it is associated with serious complications in adult life, such as heart failure, acute coronary syndrome, and premature sudden death. This review aims to address childhood obesity as a worldwide health concern and focuses on the cardiovascular risk and adverse outcomes associated with this condition. This review presents details of obesity-related cardiac structural and functional changes, such as left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) and dysfunction, respectively. A search of multiple medical databases was performed, and the results yielded many studies related to pediatric left ventricular hypertrophy; seventeen studies were found on left ventricular hypertrophy in obese children from 1980 to 2015. Most of these studies demonstrated that obesity and its comorbidities are important predictors for left ventricular hypertrophy in the pediatric age group. Furthermore, weight reduction is an important measure to reverse these structural changes and reduce the associated risks.

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