Check your baby's chance of obesity with a two-minute online test


Researchers have developed a simple five-question online test to determine a baby's risk of childhood obesity.

The team developed a formula using known obesity risk factors with the hope that it will help identify babies at risk.

A quarter of Australian children are considered overweight or obese and according to the Dietitians Association of Australia, obese children have a 25 to 50 percent chance of becoming obese adults, which puts them at increased risk of type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

Researchers from Imperial College London developed the test after studying more than 4000 Finnish children, 1500 Italian children and 1000 US children.

They found that using five simple measurements, including the child's birth-weight, both parents' body mass index and knowledge of whether the mother smoked, gave an accurate prediction of a child's chances of obesity.

They also looked at the mother's professional status, as well as the number of people in the child's household, after previous studies found children from single-parent households had a greater chance of obesity.

These risk factors have been known for a long time, but this is the first time they've been used in a formula that can make a prediction.

"The equation is based on data everyone can obtain from a newborn, and we found it can predict around 80 percent of obese children," said study leader Professor Philippe Froguel from Imperial College London.

Professor Froguel said the best chance children have of avoiding obesity is if they have good habits instilled from an early age.

"Once a young child becomes obese, it's difficult for them to lose weight, so prevention is the best strategy and it has to begin as early as possible," he said.


Professor Lousie Baur, from the paediatrics and child health discipline at the University of Sydney, told ninemsn that the test is interesting.

"It makes a lot of sense — these are all known risk factors," she said.

"But the issue is that there are a lot of things there that are hard to change. If the mum has smoked during pregnancy and the baby has already been born and the mum is in a particular job … I presume they are not saying get a better job, they are just saying you have a higher risk so you need to try even harder to provide a healthy lifestyle for your child if they have been born with a few risk factors."

Professor Baur would like to see other behavioural lifestyle risk factors added to a test like this.

"Things like TV time, sleep time, sleep duration, whether you drink soft drinks, whether you eat breakfast and how much physical activity you do," she said.

"Parental obesity is one of the bigger risk factors for childhood obesity. There are shared genes and shared lifestyle factors that either protect or predispose a person."

The research was published in the journal PLoS ONE.