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A new study has found that children who are either too skinny or too fat have a higher risk of impaired lung function. The study was published in the European Respiratory Journal and conducted by researchers from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. The study gives another reason why it is important for your child to reach and maintain a healthy weight.

The results of the study, however, showed that if their weight can be normalized before they reach adulthood, this impairment can be offset, according to a report in US News.

Dr Erik Melén, a professor of paediatrics with the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and the principal investigator of the study said, “This highlights how important it is to optimize children’s growth both early in life and during their early school years and adolescence.”

About 1 in 10 children have reduced lung function development in childhood, and as a result, they can’t achieve maximum lung capacity as adults, researchers explained in background notes. This increases their risk of serious health problems like heart disease, lung disease and diabetes.

For the study, the researchers tracked 3,200 children from birth through age 24. During that period, the kids had their BMI measured between four to 14 times. Gang Wang, lead investigator and a postdoctoral researcher in clinical science and education with the Karolinska Institute said, “In this study, the largest so far, we’ve been able to follow children from birth all the way to the age of 24, covering the entire period of lung function development.”

The researchers found that kids began to become too skinny, normal weight or too fat by the age of 2. Lung function was measured at ages 8, 16 and 24, researchers said, to give an idea of the children’s airway development.

The results of the study showed that, unlike children with normal BMI, those with a high or increasing BMI had impaired lung function as adults, primarily the result of restricted airflow in the lungs.

Melén noted in a Karolinska news release, “Interestingly, we found that in the group with an initially high BMI but a normalized BMI before puberty, lung function was not impaired in adulthood.”

Urine samples from the children with high BMI also showed increased levels of metabolites of the essential amino acid histidine. A similar pattern has been observed in patients with asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Melén said, “We see here objective biomarkers for the correlation we’ve found, even if we don’t yet know exactly the molecular association between high BMI, histidine and impaired lung development.”

But low BMI also was linked to reduced lung function, in that case, due to inadequate lung growth, researchers found. Wang said, “The focus has been on overweight, but we also need to capture children with a low BMI and introduce nutritional measures.”

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