How heavy is the impact of childhood obesity on cardiovascular risk?

Given the current high prevalence of childhood overweight and obesity and the limited resources available to manage this problem, it is vital to identify overweight/obese children who are at higher cardiometabolic risk, both during childhood and later in adult life.Not all of these children have the same degree of metabolic dysregulation, nor is this dysregulation necessarily proportional to the degree of excess adiposity.1 Metabolic dysregulation may be associated with an individual's predisposition to develop low-grade inflammation and oxidative stress, which play a central role in the genesis and progression of atherosclerotic disease and other diseases associated with overweight/obesity.Adipose tissue was long considered a passive storage organ, but it is now seen as a metabolically active endocrine organ that secretes hormones such as leptin, growth factors such as insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), inflammatory mediators, enzymes and metabolites.Adipose tissue dysfunction (adiposopathy) results in a chronic pro-inflammatory and pro-oxidative state, resulting in comorbidity.2---5 Identifying children with this condition would enable targeted follow-up.The article by Rodrigues et al. published in this issue of the Journal, 6 on the association between body adiposity and the risk of high blood pressure in school-ଝ Please cite this article as: Mansilha HF.Em idade pediátrica, o que pesa a obesidade quanto ao risco cardiovascular?Rev Port Cardiol.