Childhood obesity and systemic hypertension Health, Medicine Essay

The Relationship between Childhood Obesity and Systemic Hypertension
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Childhood Obesity and Systemic Hypertension
Obesity is one of the most common lifestyle disorders in children globally. About 17% of children between 2-12 years are obese (Bleich et al., 2018). Systemic hypertension results from gaining excessive weight. Overweight children face a greater risk of cardiovascular diseases, making them have high systolic and diastolic blood pressure. Thus cardiovascular diseases coupled with obesity increase heart problems in adulthood, increasing mortality and morbidity rates. Childhood obesity has led to concerns regarding excessive weight gain and resulting complications (Bleich et al., 2018). As much as prevention is an essential strategy, it is impossible to identify children predisposed to obesity. Thus, there is a greater likelihood that the children will gain too much weight and require treatment approaches to avoid the long-term effects of obesity, such as systemic hypertension.
The increasing prevalence of obesity in children has brought about a change in pediatric hypertension (Llewellyn et al., 2016). Children with obesity should undergo frequent blood pressure checkups to detect any elevations. As much as it might be challenging to measure a child's blood pressure with a high body mass index (BMI), there is the need to use either thigh cuff or arm cuff depending on the child's arm size. The wrong cuff will make blood pressure measurement challenging and increase the risk of getting ineffective results (Bleich et al., 2018). Once an obese child is confirmed to be having hypertension, they should undergo screening to determine other causes of high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease risk factors. If there are no secondary causes of hypertension in obese children, then it is appropriate to diagnose a case of primary obesity-related high blood pressure.
According to Bleich et al. (2018), BMI in children is an excellent determinant of blood pressure, just like in adults. In any case, children with obesity have significantly high blood pressure. They are at a higher risk of developing hypertension when they grow up than pediatrics with low body weight. There are various ways of explaining the relationship between excessive weight gain and systemic hypertension. Activation of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) plays a significant role in inducing hypertension due to childhood obesity (Llewellyn et al., 2016). Obesity affects SNS activity in various tissues in the body, including those in the kidney and the muscles. An exception, in this case, is the heart, which has regular or low SNS activity. Childhood obesity impairs the autonomic nervous system balance leading to an increase in SNS activity. Abdominal obesity and visceral adiposity increase the activation of SNS (Llewellyn et al., 2016). Thus, weight loss in obesity cases reduces the activity of SNS, which significantly reduces blood pressure. Denervation of the kidn...