Fat intake and cardiac autonomic dysfunction in obese children: What is the relationship?

Cardiovascular disease in children is becoming ever more common, in parallel with the increasing prevalence of childhood obesity.Tracking of childhood obesity to adulthood increases the risk of developing cardiovascular disease, and by 2035, the number of excess cardiovascular events attributable to adolescent overweight in the USA is expected to exceed 100 000 a year.1,2 There is thus an urgent need to focus on this problem, in order to prevent cardiovascular disease from affecting children at ever younger ages.The article by Gulgun et al. 3 in this issue of the Journal on the relationship between the levels of different types of erythrocyte membrane fatty acids and cardiac autonomic dysfunction in pubertal children is thus of considerable interest, especially as it deals with the effects of obesity on the autonomic nervous system rather than with the more commonly discussed impact on premature development and accelerated cardiovascular atherosclerosis, 4 including in childhood.The authors of this case-control study, which included 48 obese and 32 healthy pubertal children aged 11.95±2.42and 12.48±2.27years, respectively, conclude that the differences they found between these groups in levels of omega-6 ଝ Please cite this article as: Ferreira Mansilha H. Lípidos da dieta e disfunc ¸ão autonómica cardíaca na obesidade em idade pediátrica: qual a associac ¸ão?Rev Port Cardiol.