Arterial Compliance in Obesity- A Valuable Tool or Opening Up a Pandora’s Box?

Excerpt

Childhood obesity has emerged as a new age epidemic with significant short and long term implications. Given the association of childhood obesity with complications like insulin resistance, dyslipidemia and hypertension it is likely that obese children are at a substantial cardiovascular risk as adults. Timely identification of children at risk to cardiovascular complications is important for targeted preventive strategies. An ideal tool to assess long term cardiovascular risk in obese children should be easy to use, reproducible and able to predict long term adverse cardiovascular outcomes. Reduced arterial compliance measured by pulse wave form or peak wave velocity in central and peripheral circulation has been associated with obesity and cardiovascular risk in adults [1]. The validity for the same in children is not yet established. …