A big, strong heart is important to staying healthy and active. But hearts can grow too big. Now, a study finds that obese children as young as eight often have enlarged, potentially unhealthy, hearts.
An enlarged heart won’t kill someone. Indeed, elite athletes who are exercising their muscles — including their heart muscle — may end up with a big, powerful heart. But in couch potatoes, an enlarged heart can be a sign of developing heart disease. And that’s what the new study uncovered.
Among very overweight kids, “Even the youngest children in our study, who were only 8 years old, had evidence of heart disease,” notes Brandon Fornwalt. He works at the Geisinger Health System in Danville, Penn. There, he studies how muscle in the heart expands and contracts to pump blood throughout the body.
His team used magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, to take pictures of 40 kids’ hearts. The children were all between 8 and 18 years old. Half were obese, meaning overweight to an unhealthy degree. The rest were at a healthy weight. From the MRI images, the scientists could see that 40 percent of the obese children had enlarged hearts that interfered with how well blood pumped throughout their bodies. No healthy-weight child had such problems.
Obese children also had changes to their left ventricle. That’s the lower left chamber of the heart. Its job is to pump oxygen-rich blood out to the rest of the body. Of the human heart’s four chambers, the left ventricle is thickest. But obese children had thicker left ventricles compared to those in normal-weight children.
