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The adult drugs these kids take to battle high cholesterol, hypertension and other conditions present problems in children that they don't in grownups, if only because a 60-year-old may have to take them for 20 years whereas a 10-year-old would take them for 70. It's not just that the drugs haven't been well tested in children; it's also that they often have side effects, including stomach pains, muscle weakness and fatigue.
"It is a little controversial when you start to say that a child or adolescent should be on a statin," says Dr. Thomas McInerny, past president of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). "But the alternative of having that child have a heart attack in his 30s or 40s is not a very pretty one."
And no matter the long-term effects of drugs, there's some question as to whether a child who has already started down the early-aging road can ever be fully healthy. Scarred tissue in the liver may never entirely recover, damaged chromosomes in the cells may be beyond repair, and obesity may trigger lasting changes in metabolism so that even when weight is taken off and kept off, food will never be processed in the same way again.
Obesity is not the only thing responsible for superannuated kids. Researchers are learning more every day about the downstream impact of stress on biochemistry, as well as about the potentially harmful effects of environmental agents, from pollutants to naturally occurring chemicals like hormones. The medical literature may, in a paradoxical way, benefit from all this, since it is accumulating knowledge about premature aging that would not have been available otherwise. But it comes at the cost of a perverse kind of longitudinal experiment--one that would violate every imaginable canon of ethics--in which healthy kids are placed under stress, immersed in a chemically toxic environment, fed a diet that causes them to gain more and more weight and then left to suffer the consequences.
Paying the Price
"He's so young, we never thought anything would happen to him." That's what Eva Amador of Houston thought when she brought her 10-year-old son Eric in for his annual checkup last year. Eric's pediatrician had mentioned the boy's weight during previous visits: at 106 lb. (48 kg) and 4 ft. 8 in. (142 cm), he was on the heavy side for his age and height. But he either rode his bike or walked the four blocks to and from school and didn't spend much time in front of the television or computer. Amador and her husband figured he would start losing weight as he got a little older and the girls started paying attention. "My husband thought it was funny," she says.
A blood test changed their view. Eric's total cholesterol had soared to an alarming 266, and the doctor was concerned enough to order an ultrasound of his liver. That scan revealed real trouble. Eric's liver was larger than it should have been, and a biopsy confirmed that he had what's straightforwardly known as a fatty liver--a condition that's often the result of alcoholism and, regardless of the cause, is not usually seen in patients under 50.