Obesity and Blood Pressure in children

Estimates of relationships between blood pressures and anthropometric structure or body composition were made on a total sample of 414 children, taking age and sex into account. A subsample of 250 children was formed from obese (or slightly obese) subjects. A different pattern in anthropometric structure and body composition resulted in relation to a different degree of obesity. A canonical correlation analysis was carried out for each sex, in which a multivariate measure of the linear association between heart-circulatory functionality parameters, on the one hand, and all the anthropometric traits and body composition parameters, on the other, was computed. This association resulted statistically significant in both sexes, also if a difference was observed as concerns the traits that most heavily contributed to the relation-ships between sets of variables, with an evident sexual dimorphism also in infancy. The necessity of preventive measures and sanitary screening also during infancy was pointed out.