Scientists say that a new type of blood test using lipids “could make it easier to identify children at risk of complications around obesity including type two diabetes, liver and heart disease.” King's College London's website has the release.
Researchers suggest that using machines that “test blood plasma in babies” could “help doctors spot early signs of disease in children quicker and help them access the right treatment.”
The new findings also “contest the common idea that cholesterol is a leading cause of complications around obesity in children, identifying new lipid molecules which contribute to health risks like blood pressure but are not only correlated with a child’s weight.” Current evidence puts the “types of different lipid present in the body in the thousands, each with separate functions.”
The team assessed the lipids in the blood of 1,300 children with obesity and then put 200 of them on the “HOLBAEK-model for a year, a lifestyle intervention for people with obesity popular in Denmark.” In those children, “counts of lipids tied to diabetes risk, insulin resistance and blood pressure decreased, despite limited improvements in some children’s BMI.”
Dr. Cristina Legido-Quigley, a group leader in Systems Medicine at King’s College London, said that this “has the potential to be an entirely new way to evaluate someone’s personal risk of disease and by studying how to change lipid molecules in the body, we could even prevent metabolic diseases like diabetes altogether.”
