Smartest Doc
Pediatric Idiopathic Intracranial Hypertension and Extreme Childhood Obesity
The Journal of Pediatrics, 05/31/2012
Brara SM et al. – The authors found that childhood obesity is strongly associated with an increased risk of pediatric IIH in adolescents. These findings suggest that the childhood obesity epidemic is likely to lead to increased morbidity from IIH particularly among extremely obese, White non–Hispanic teenage girls.
Methods- Risk estimates were obtained from the Kaiser Permanente Southern California Children's Health Study (n = 913 178). Weight classes were assigned by body mass index specific for age and sex.
- A combination of electronic database searches followed by complete medical records review was used to identify all children diagnosed with IIH between 2006 and 2009.
- They identified 78 children with IIH, the majority of whom were girls (n = 66, 84.5%), age 11-19 (n = 66, 84.5%), non-Hispanic Whites (n = 37, 47.4%), and overweight or obese (n = 57, 73.1%).
- The adjusted ORs and 95% CIs of IIH with increasing weight class were 1.00, 3.56 (1.72-7.39), 6.45 (3.10-13.44), and 16.14 (8.18-31.85) for underweight/normal weight (reference category), overweight, moderately obese and extremely obese 11-19 year olds, respectively (P for trend < .001).
- Other independent IIH risk factors included White non-Hispanic race/ethnicity for all age groups and female sex, but only in older children.
- Overweight/obese children also had more IIH symptoms at onset than normal weight children.
