Overweight in childhood and adolescence

Abstract

About 40% of children with weight troubles (as well as 60% of adolescents in the same conditions) will remain obese during their adult life. With this in mind, it is clear enough that many cases of adulthood's obesity found their roots in paediatric age. Belonging to a lineage where obesity runs in the family appears as an important risk factor in the development of childhood obesity, but the relationship between parental and offspring obesity is not limited to genetic factors. Actually, environment can play a major role in both generations. The concept of environment has widened enough, in the recent years, and scientists look at it now as the "envirome", the total complement of environmental characteristics, conditions, and processes required for life form viability and successful adaptation. Genome and environment coexist, and genomic expression can be modified by environment, leading to the idea that genome and envirome can interact through epigenetic modifications, which are active during the individual life-span, but are suspected to have an inter-generational influence as well. Should epigenomics' hypothesis be confirmed as reliable, then the whole weighing condition, development, and future of an individual would be really decided during the very first periods of his/her life. According to the hypothesis, epigenetic changes start during the gestational period, and - quite possibly - even before it. We are still trying to understand which external environmental factors can shape the genomic expression, and what impact each factor can have.