Feb 2017
Endocrine Society Guidelines for Childhood Obesity
The Endocrine Society have just issued their new Clinical Practice Guidelines advising healthcare professionals on how to assess, prevent and treat childhood obesity.
The guidelines, entitled "Pediatric Obesity-Assessment, Treatment, and Prevention: An Endocrine Society Clinical Practice Guideline" will appear in the March 2017 print issue of The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM). In addition to prevention and treatment, the guideline provides recommendations on how to evaluate affected children for medical or psychological complications, when to evaluate children for rare genetic causes of obesity and when to consider medications or surgery for the most severely affected older adolescents.
Since the Society last issued a pediatric obesity guideline in 2008, physicians have access to new information on genetic causes of obesity, psychological complications associated with obesity, surgical techniques and medications that are now available for the most severely affected older teenagers. The guideline offers information on incorporating these developments into patient care.
Recommendations from the guideline include:
- Children or teens with a BMI greater than or equal to the 85th percentile should be evaluated for related conditions such as metabolic syndrome and diabetes.
- About 7 percent of children with extreme obesity may have rare chromosomal abnormalities or genetic mutations. The guideline suggests specific genetic testing when there is early onset obesity (before 5 years old), an increased drive to consume food known as extreme hyperphagia, other clinical findings of genetic obesity syndromes, or a family history of extreme obesity.
The Endocrine Society Task Force that developed these guidelines included: Professors Dennis Styne (University of California), Silva Arslanian (University of Pittsburgh), Ellen Connor (University of Wisconsin), Hassan Murad (Mayo Clinic, Rochester), Janet Silverstein (University of Florida), Jack Yanovski (NIH) and Sadaf Farooqi (University of Cambridge, UK).
