March 6, 2023 – New health data suggests young people in America will live shortened and poor quality lives as a result of rising rates of obesity, diabetes and hypertension. Researchers said the ever-increasing variety of health risks amongst young people needs to be a “call to action,” mentioning that a sedentary lifestyle contributes to the issues.
While the prevalence of those health problems is increasing amongst people of their 20s, 30s and 40s, successful treatment rates remain strikingly low. Researchers also found that early health problems disproportionately affect people of black or Hispanic origin.
The lack of treatment “may be due to the fact that many young adults are unaware of their diagnosis,” says researcher Rishi K. Wadhera, MD, in a opinion“The increase in cardiovascular risk factors we observed could lead to higher lifetime rates of heart attacks, strokes and heart failure and have serious long-term public health implications.”
“Our findings should be a call to action to intensify public health and clinical interventions focused on preventing and treating cardiovascular risk factors in young adults,” says Wadhera, assistant professor of drugs at Harvard Medical School.
Published this week in Journal of the American Medical AssociationThe study evaluated health data from 12,924 people living within the United States between the ages of 20 and 44 from 2009 to March 2020. The average age was 31.8 years and 50.6% of the people within the study were women.
The major results of the study of the 20- to 44-year-old age group showed that a minimum of:
- 1 in 25 people had diabetes
- 4 out of 10 people were obese
- 1 in 10 people had hypertension
- 1 in 3 people had high cholesterol
All of those health problems increased throughout the study period, excluding high cholesterol, which decreased from 40.5% to 36.1% of individuals.
The researchers pointed to the increased prevalence of hypertension amongst young blacks, who're twice as more likely to suffer from the disease as other groups. The researchers found that there was not a single decline in prevalence throughout the 10-year study period.
To address the 19.3% hypertension rate amongst young blacks, the authors suggested “scaling up tailored, community-based programs (e.g., pharmacist-led interventions in black hair salons) and large-scale health system initiatives that screen and treat young black adults for uncontrolled blood pressure, combined with efforts to address socioeconomic factors (e.g., poverty), community factors (e.g., access to primary care), and environmental factors (e.g., green spaces for regular exercise).”
A major increase in hypertension was observed amongst young Mexicans and other young adults of Hispanic origin throughout the 10-year study period. They cited limited access to healthy foods, which led to excessive consumption of salty foods, as one among the causes.
“There is also an increase in diabetes cases among Mexican American adults, which is particularly concerning because the rate of undiagnosed diabetes cases is high in this population,” they write. “These patterns likely reflect the high and rising burden of obesity in this population, the sharp increase in consumption of ultra-processed foods, and socioeconomic factors, including barriers to access to insurance and healthy foods.”