Children Who Suffered from Childhood Trauma More Likely to Become Obese

Children who suffered from childhood trauma found it much easier to gain weight and eventually become obese by the age of 15, a new study finds.

Stress among childhood have been closely associated with an increased risk of becoming overweight, although is not always consistent from one study to the other. "I felt like I was seeing a lot of children who had experienced stress early in their lives later gain weight pretty rapidly," said Dr. Julie Lumeng from the University of the Michigan Medical School.

She told Reuters health: "There has been quite a bit of research looking at stress in the lives of adults leading to weight gain, but it has not been studied as much in children. We did this particular study because it looked at simply 'events' that had occurred in the children's lives and asked mothers to rate events in terms of how much of impact they had," she added. The researchers involved in the study used data from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. Mothers of 848 children involved in the study were asked to respond to surveys when their children were aged four, nine and 11. 

They were asked to look into 71 different life events and they were also asked to rate its impact on the lives of their child following a pre-designed scale. Negative three is scaled as extremely negative, zero is scaled as with no effect and positive three is scaled as extremely positive. The researchers looked into four categories of negative life events including health problems in the family, work, school or financial stability. They also looked into emotional aspects of family relationships including structure, caregiving and routine.