The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is recommending more aggressive treatment of childhood obesity, including the use of pharmaceutical and surgical interventions for those as young as 12 or 13.
In its new guidance released Monday in the organization’s journal Pediatrics, AAP dismisses the sole approach of monitoring still-growing children to see if independent changes families and children can make on their own leads to success. Such a wait-and-see method is largely useless, the authors of the guidance say, given that “14.4 million children and adolescents” are now affected by obesity and its long-term health consequences.
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