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According to new research from the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy, first nations children are experiencing a double burden of physical and mental illness.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

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“If feels like somebody stabbed you and stabs you and stabs you,” Elkins said. “It hurts really, really, really bad.”

“It was horrible,” her mother, Lanai Turnbough, said. “It was the worst feeling ever. It was devastating because you see your baby, she’s crying hysterically, and there’s nothing you can do for her.”

While in the hospital at Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH), doctors informed her she has several kidney stones.

Pediatric Urologist Dr. Paul Austin said the number of pediatric patients with kidney stones at TCH is already up 40% just this year.

“I think it’s fluid, hydration. I think it’s diet. Those are the two biggest culprits,” Austin said. “I think kids are eating too much processed foods with high sodium and they don’t drink enough.”

The best advice for dealing with kidney stones is to try to avoid them in the first place. Dr. Austin said our warm climate and schools are adding to the problem.

“Restrictions of water bottles in the classroom, it may also be the amount of time (or lack thereof) that they have between classes to go to the water fountain,” Austin said. “So, I think it’s a combination of multiple factors.”

Elkins has an appointment in two weeks at the TCH Kidney Stone Clinic, where doctors will determine the best way to treat the kidney stones she hasn’t passed and give diet instructions that might help her avoid them in the future.

Her mom said with as common as they’ve become, she wishes more clinics like this one could be available to help children.

Diet modification, such as increased water is usually the biggest treatment suggestion. There are also some people who need surgical intervention or shock waves to break the kidney stones so that they can pass.

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Study reveals that the default mode network in children with Type 1 diabetes does not switch off when focusing on a task

A study led by Stanford scientists at Stanford University School of Medicine has shown that children with Type 1 diabetes show slight but important differences in brain function compared with those who don’t suffer from the disease.

The study, in PLOS Medicine, is the first of its kind to evaluate what occurs in the brains of children with diabetes during a cognitive task.

Abnormal brain activity

The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging scans when the children’s brains were at work to measure brain function. Compared to children without the disease, the children with diabetes displayed a set of abnormal brain-activity patterns that have been seen in many other disorders, including a cognitive decline in ageing, concussion, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and multiple sclerosis.

The study also reported that abnormal brain-activity patterns were more pronounced in children who had lived with diabetes for longer.

Lara Foland-Ross, PhD, senior research associate at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research at Stanford said: “Our findings suggest that, in children with Type 1 diabetes, the brain isn’t being as efficient as it could.”

Foland-Ross shares lead authorship of the paper with Bruce Buckingham, MD, professor emeritus of paediatrics at Stanford.

Allan Reiss, MD, study’s senior author and professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Stanford said: “The takeaway from our study is that, despite a lot of attention from endocrinologists to this group of patients, and real improvements in clinical guidelines, children with diabetes are still at risk of having learning and behavioural issues that are likely associated with their disease.”

Blood sugar affects brain development

Type 1 diabetes occurs when the pancreas fails to make insulin, a hormone that helps regulate blood sugar. To combat this, patients are given insulin via injections or an insulin pump. But even with treatment, their blood levels of glucose – the main sugar in blood – fluctuate much more than in healthy individuals.

Foland-Ross explains: “Kids with diabetes have chronic swings in blood glucose levels, and glucose is important for brain development.”

Brain cells need a steady supply of glucose for fuel. Earlier work revealed brain-structure changes and mild performance impairment on cognitive tasks in children with Type 1 diabetes, but the mechanism had never been studied.

Study methodology

93 children with type 1 diabetes had fMRI brain scans conducted. The children were assessed across five sites: Nemours Children’s Health System in Jacksonville, Florida; Stanford; Washington University in St Louis; the University of Iowa; and Yale.

An additional 57 children who did not have the disease composed the control group. All participants were between 7 and 14 years old. Standard behavioural and cognitive tests were given to all the children before brain scanning.

Whilst in the fMRI scanner, the children performed a cognitive task called “go/no-go” where different letters of the alphabet were shown in random order, and participants were asked to press a button in response to every letter except “X.” The task is often used in brain-scanning studies to evaluate what is happening in the brain while participants are concentrating.

The results showed that the children with diabetes performed the task as accurately as those in the control group, but their brains were behaving differently.

In children with diabetes, the default-mode network, which is the brain’s “idle” system, was not shutting off during the task. To compensate for the abnormal activation of the default-mode network, the brain’s executive control networks, responsible for aspects of self-regulation and concentration, were working harder than normal in the children with diabetes.

These abnormalities were more pronounced in children who had been diagnosed with diabetes at younger ages, suggesting that the problem may worsen with time.

Foland-Ross said: “The longer the exposure you have to dynamic changes in blood glucose levels, the greater the alterations in brain function with respect to the default-mode network.”

Studies in adults with diabetes suggest that in the later stages of the disease, the brain eventually loses its ability to compensate for this problem.

What’s next?

Scientists want to study whether achieving better blood glucose concentrations through treatment with a closed-loop artificial pancreas benefits children’s brain function. These devices electronically couple a blood glucose sensor to an insulin pump that automatically adjusts insulin delivery.

Reiss said: “We hope that with improvements in devices for diabetes treatment, these findings will either decrease in severity or go away. With better blood sugar control, children’s brains might be able to recover normal activity.

“Young brains have the most potential for plasticity and repair, but children also have a long time to live with the consequences, if problems with brain function persist.”

The paper’s other Stanford co-authors are Gabby Tong, an affiliate at the Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research at Stanford, and Paul Mazaika, PhD, associate director of computational neuroimaging at the centre. Researchers at all study sites also contributed to the work.

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It is possible to improve symptoms in autistic children with a cheap generic drug, our latest study shows. The drug, bumetanide, is widely used to treat high blood pressure and swelling, and it costs no more than £10 (US$13) for a month’s supply of pills.

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder which is more common in boys than girls. According to the World Health Organization, 1-2 percent of people have the condition.

Autism can be diagnosed as early as two years old or even at 18 months. Children with moderate or severe autism can find social situations difficult. They may not make eye contact with their parents or take part in cooperative play and conversation.

They may also show repetitive behaviour and have an intense interest in objects. This behaviour not only affects engagement in family activities but can also make it harder for them to make friends at school.

International study

We were motivated to test bumetanide as a result of background findings which suggested that the drug changed important brain chemicals in mouse models of autism; and also by some studies, including in autistic teenagers, showing that bumetanide may have beneficial effects.

Our research group, an international collaboration between researchers at several institutions in China and the University of Cambridge, wanted to focus on young children with moderate and severe autism and to test whether bumetanide could improve their symptoms.

We also wanted to understand the mechanism by which the drug achieved this. Understanding how bumetanide worked could lead to future drug development to treat moderate and severe autism.

There were 81 children with moderate to severe autism in our study – 42 in the bumetanide group, who received 0.5mg of bumetanide twice a day for three months; and 39 children in the control group, who received no treatment. The children were three to six years of age.

Some of the children had their brains scanned using magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) – 38 in the bumetanide group and 17 in the control group.

MRS is a non-invasive way of measuring chemicals in the brain. For our study, we measured brain chemicals called GABA and glutamate, which are important for learning and brain plasticity (the brain’s ability to change and adapt as a result of experience).

In the bumetanide group, autism symptoms improved as measured by the childhood autism rating scale (CARS) and also by a doctor’s overall impression. The doctors who were assessing symptom change were “blind” to treatment – that is, they were unaware of who was receiving bumetanide.

Improvements in symptoms were associated with changes in the brain chemicals GABA/glutamate ratios and, in particular, with decreases in GABA.

Looking specifically at what improved on the rating scale, we found decreases in repetitive behaviour and decreased interest in objects. These reductions in unsociable behaviour allow more time for increases in social behaviour.

One of the mothers of a four-year-old boy, living in a rural area outside Shanghai, said that her child, who was in the bumetanide group, became better at making eye contact with family members and relatives and was able to take part in more family activities.

We also found that the drug is safe for young autistic children and has no significant side-effects. Bumetanide could improve the quality of life and wellbeing of autistic children.

Existing treatments are predominantly behavioural, including Applied Behaviour Analysis or ABA. Most families, particularly those in rural areas, will have limited or no access to these treatments, which are generally only available in specialised centres. The use of bumetanide would mean that there would even be a treatment for autistic children living in rural areas.

This study is important and exciting because bumetanide can improve social learning and reduce autism symptoms when the brains of these children are still developing. We now know that human brains are still in development until late adolescence and early adulthood.

Further research is now needed to confirm the effectiveness of bumetanide in treating autism. 

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Children of mothers with diabetes have increased rates of early onset cardiovascular disease or CVD (conditions affecting the heart or blood vessels) from childhood up to the age of 40, the researchers have warned.

The increased rates were more pronounced among children of mothers with a history of CVD or diabetic complications, said the study published in the journal The BMJ.
“Our study provides evidence that children of mothers with diabetes, especially those with a history of CVD or with diabetic complications, had increased rates of early onset CVD throughout the early decades of life,” said study researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark.

If this association is shown to be causal, preventing, screening, and treating diabetes in women of childbearing age could be important not only for improving the health of the women but also for reducing long term risks of CVD in their offspring, the researchers added

The number of women diagnosed with diabetes before or during pregnancy has increased globally, and children of these women are more likely to have risk factors for future CVD, such as high blood pressure and high blood sugar levels. It is unclear, however, whether or to what extent exposure to diabetes in the womb increases the risk of developing CVD in offspring over a lifetime.

So an international team of researchers set out to evaluate associations between diabetes diagnosed before or during pregnancy and early onset CVD in children during their first four decades of life. They base their findings on national registry data for over 2.4 million children born without congenital heart disease in Denmark from 1977 to 2016.

Diabetes was categorised as pregestational (before pregnancy) or gestational (during pregnancy) and women with diabetic complications were identified.

Other potentially influential factors, such as mother’s age, education, lifestyle and medical history were also taken into account. During up to 40 years of follow-up, children of mothers with diabetes had a 29 per cent increased overall rate of early onset CVD compared with children of mothers who did not have diabetes (cumulative risks: 17.8 per cent vs 13.1 per cent ).

The researchers also found higher rates for specific types of CVD children of mothers with diabetes, particularly heart failure (45 per cent), hypertensive disease (78 per cent), deep vein thrombosis (82 per cent), and pulmonary embolism (91 per cent).

Increased rates were seen in each age group in childhood (before 20 years of age) and early adulthood (from 20 to 40 years of age), regardless of the type of diabetes they were exposed to (pregestational or gestational) and rates were similar for both type 1 and type 2 diabetes, the study said. (IANS).

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Vermont: Obese children have lower working memory in comparison to children with normal weight, a new study has demonstrated.

The study published in JAMA Pediatrics and performed at the University of Vermont and Yale University found that obese children had a thinner prefrontal cortex than normal-weight children.

The thinner cortex could be a factor in the decreased executive function earlier studies observed among children with higher BMI.

Jennifer Laurent, an associate professor in the Department of Nursing at the University of Vermont said: “Our results show an important connection; that kids with higher BMI tend to have a thinner cerebral cortex, especially in the prefrontal area.”

The study was based on the data which followed 10,000 teens over a 10 year period. Every two years, study subjects are interviewed, given a battery of tests, gave blood samples and underwent brain scans.

The study analyzed results from 3,190 nine- and 10-year-olds recruited at 21 ABCD sites in 2017.

This rigorous research supported the conclusions of its predecessor, who appeared to have a poorer working memory for participants with higher BMI.

Laurent further mentioned that the hypothesis of the study was that the thickness of the cerebral cortex would mediate the relationship between BMI and executive function.

One of the researchers of the study said: “We found widespread thinning of the cerebral cortex. That’s significant because we know that executive function, things like memory and the ability to plan, are controlled in that area of the brain.”

More research is necessary to determine how the three variables are related.

From rodent models and adult studies, it has been shown that obesity can induce low-grade inflammatory effects, which actually do alter the cellular structure and can lead to cardiovascular disease. With prolonged exposure to obesity, it is possible that children have chronic inflammation, and that may actually be affecting their brain in the long term.

If that were the case, there would be significant public health implications, Laurent said. “We would want to proactively encourage changes in kids’ diets and exercise levels at a young age with the understanding that it’s not only the heart that is being affected by obesity, it is perhaps also the brain.”

The decrease in working memory was, however, a statistical observation.

“We did not look at behaviour. It’s very important that this work not further stigmatize people who are obese or overweight. What we’re saying is that, according to our measures, we are seeing something that bears watching. How and if it translates to behaviour is for future research to determine,” Laurent added.

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The latest ISD Scotland statistics show that more than a one in five children (22 per cent) in primary one in Scotland were found to be at risk of being overweight or obese.

Professor Linda Bauld, Cancer Research UK’s prevention expert, based at the University of Edinburgh, described the figures as “shocking”.

She added: “Obesity is the second biggest preventable cause of cancer after smoking, so tackling this is crucial if we’re to improve the health of future generations.”

As well as the cancer risk, overweight and obesity in childhood is associated with a wide range of other health problems such heart disease, type 2 diabetes, asthma, emotional distress and mental health difficulties.

In addition, overweight and obese children are at risk of remaining overweight or obese as adults.

Since 2001/02, the overall proportion of P1 children who are at risk of overweight or obesity has remained fairly constant.

However, there are now substantial inequalities in child unhealthy weight across Scotland.

Since 2001/02, the proportion of P1 children at risk of overweight or obesity has increased in the most deprived areas but decreased in the least deprived areas.

Children living in more deprived areas were more than twice as likely to be at risk of obesity than children living in the least deprived areas.

Boys in P1 are slightly less likely than girls to have a healthy weight.

Professor Bauld believes there were step that should be taken to tackle overweight and obesity in children.

“The Scottish Government has a role to play here,” she said.

“It must ensure planned legislation to restrict junk food promotions is introduced and passed before the next Scottish Parliament elections.

“Our shopping environment has a big influence on what we buy with special offers and multibuys on junk food powerfully persuading us to stock up on unhealthy items.”

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Challenging the common belief  that puts the blame on both on diet and lack of exercise for obesity among children , a new report says that eating too much — not exercising too little — could lead to long-term weight gain in children.

“Our study challenge that notion. We demonstrate that Amazonian children with physically active lifestyles and chronic immunological challenges don’t actually burn more calories than much more sedentary children living here in the U.S,” said Samuel Urlacher, assistant professor of anthropology at Baylor University in Texas.

Scientists explained that this similarity in energy expenditure suggests that the human body has the ability to balance energy budgets when placed in different contexts.

“Ultimately, eating too much, not moving too little, may be at the core of long-term weight gain and the global nutrition transition that often begins during childhood,” he said in a paper published in Science Advances.

To examine how children spend calories, Urlacher and his colleagues took and studied data from 44 forager-horticulturalist Shuar children (ages 5 to 12). The team then compared it to those of industrialized children in the US and the UK. 

The team used gold-standard isotope-tracking and respirometry methods, to measure the energy expenditure among children. With these findings and with the help of data reflecting physical activity, immune activity, nutritional status and growth, the scientists reached to their conclusion.

Shuar children are approximately 25 per cent more physically active than industrialized children. They were found to have approximately 20 per cent greater resting energy expenditure than industrialized children, to a large degree reflecting elevated immune system activity.

Scientists said that despite wide differences in lifestyle and energy allocation, the total number of calories that Shuar children spend every day is not very different from that of industrialized children.

“These findings advance previous work among adults, showing that energy expenditure is also constrained during childhood,” said study co-author Herman Pontzer from Duke University.

However, “exercise remains critically important for health and for weight management given its effects on appetite, muscle mass, cardiopulmonary function and many other factors,” Urlacher said. 

“Our results don’t suggest otherwise. Everyone should meet recommended daily physical activity levels”.

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More than 700 children in Pakistan were infected with HIV, the virus that can cause Aids, through unsafe injections to treat them for conditions such as diarrhoea and through contaminated blood donations, according to an investigation.

Until single-use, safe needles are introduced worldwide, which the World Health Organization says must happen by the end of 2020, experts say oral medicines should be the first choice wherever possible. They call for urgent action to improve infection control, the running of blood banks and the regulation of clinics in Pakistan.

Most of the affected children were given injections with contaminated, re-used needles. They were being treated for ailments such as diarrhoea and respiratory infections for which they could have had pills or medicine by mouth, but the use of injections is widespread and families, who usually have to pay for treatment, are said to have more confidence in them.

A paper in the Lancet medical journal reports the findings from the study of more than 30,000 people in the town of Ratodero, who were tested for HIV after the outbreak became obvious in April. Experts were called in and the government closed three blood banks, almost 300 clinics and the Sindh health care Commission.

Dr Fatima Mir from the Aga Khan University in Pakistan, the lead author, said: “Pakistan has experienced a series of HIV outbreaks over the past two decades, but we’ve never before seen this many young children infected or so many health facilities involved.

“Use of syringes and needles is widespread, and Pakistan has one of the highest rates of unsafe injections in the world. Health practitioners need to use intravenous treatment only when necessary, use needles only once and screen blood for infections before using it for transfusions.”

A quarter of the children were found to be in a state of advanced disease, indicating that they had been infected some time ago. Only two-thirds of them were able to start antiretroviral therapy to keep the HIV virus at bay, because there were not adequate drug supplies or trained staff. Nine children have died. Many children were also found to be infected with the blood-borne viruses hepatitis B and C.

Once the outbreak became public, a screening camp was set up at Tehsil hospital in Ratodero, where 31,239 people were tested for HIV and 930 were found to be positive. Of those, 763 were under 16 and most (604) were under 5. More boys were affected than girls.

The paper says blood banks are often unregistered and unregulated. Those who give blood are often paid. Screening for infections is “erratic”, it says. The outbreak could be seen as the spillover from groups who have high rates of HIV infection in Larkana, including intravenous drug users, the authors wrote.

In a commentary to the journal, Prof Mark Cotton from Stellenbosch University, South Africa, wrote: “Poor infection control, unsafe injections, unlicensed practitioners, low HIV awareness, and stigma have combined with horrific consequences.

“The most worrying aspect of the outbreak is the link with a breakdown in safe injection practice and poor management of donor blood. Of 16bn injections administered every year globally, only 5% of these each are for immunisation and for contraception, respectively.

“During the 1950s and 1960s, cheap disposable syringes made of plastic were developed on an industrial scale and became available globally. With exposure to the efficacy of painful but effective intramuscular penicillin injections, the general public incorporated a belief in the importance of painful injections. These factors encouraged traditional healers and unlicensed practitioners to offer injections.”

The WHO has set a deadline of 2020 for the transition to safe, single-use syringes. Until then, it is essential that injections are limited to those that are strictly necessary, he said.

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The vast majority of children living with HIV today are in sub-Saharan Africa. While early antiretroviral therapy, or ART, has ensured less deadly outcomes for children living with and exposed to HIV, studies show the virus still may affect the brain. HIV may disrupt neurodevelopment, affecting how children learn, reason and function.

That’s why Michael Boivin, professor and director of the Psychiatry Research Program in the Michigan State University College of Osteopathic Medicine, set out to understand exactly how HIV impacts children’s neuropsychological development in a two-year longitudinal study, published in Clinical Infectious Diseases.

The research was supported in part by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health.

Boivin and his colleagues evaluated the neuropsychological development of three groups of children aged 5 to 11: those who acquired HIV perinatally and were treated with ART, those exposed but HIV-negative, and those who were never exposed. The research took place at six study sites across four countries in sub-Saharan Africa for a robust view of how HIV is affecting children in the region.

To date, it’s the first well-validated, multi-site neuropsychological evaluation of African school-aged children affected by HIV.

What the researchers discovered through various assessments was that even in the face of early treatment and good clinical care, there are still significant neuropsychological problems for children living with HIV.

“These children came into the study with a deficit compared to their counterparts,” Boivin said. “It stayed about the same throughout the two years, except in one important area: reasoning and planning. On that specific test domain, the children living with HIV failed to progress over time.”

In other words, the gap between infected and HIV-negative children grew in the planning and reasoning area over the study period. Typically, these abilities tend to blossom in the school-aged years in healthy children.

“This is the most important cognitive function for the future of children living with HIV in terms of their likelihood of taking their medications, making good decisions, abstaining from risky behaviors like early sexual activity, psychosocial issues and school-related achievement,” Boivin said.

The bottom line? Early medical treatment, started as early as 6 months of age, is probably not enough to address the neurocognitive deficits associated with HIV, even though it helps keep children alive and healthier than they would be without treatment. In these children, treatment should be started even earlier to improve long-term neurocognitive outcomes.

“We’re going to have to complement the long-term care and support with actual behavioral interventions,” Boivin said.

That’s something Boivin and his colleagues are already working on. Earlier this year, Boivin received a 5-year, $3.2 million NIH grant to continue his work with children affected by HIV in Uganda and Malawi.

Through this grant, researchers will investigate how MSU-developed computer cognitive games can serve as tools for neurocognitive evaluation, enrichment and potentially rehabilitation.

Boivin hopes that the results of both of these studies will help make this model of neuropsychological evaluation a considered part of the cost benefit of care for kids affected by HIV.

“Often it’s overlooked or seen as an afterthought, but unlike other areas of medical follow up, neuropsychological evaluation really gets at how well the kids are going to adapt and function in school, at home, in the community and in society in general,” Boivin said. “It’s really what links us most directly to the human burden of disease.”

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Major food system changes have further complicated the issue of malnutrition, especially in the low and middle income countries. In a recent Lancet study, it has been revealed that major food system changes have led the poorest countries to have high levels of obesity and overweight people along with under-nutrition.

“Our research shows that overweight and obesity levels of at least 20% among adults are found in all low-income countries. Furthermore, the double burden of high levels of both under nutrition and overweight occurs primarily in the lowest-income countries – a reality that is driven by the modern food system. This system has a global reach and is preventing low and even moderate-income countries and households from consuming safe, affordable and healthy diets in a sustainable way,” says Barry M. Popkin, lead author of the first paper and W.R. Kenan Jr., Professor of Nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health.

Almost 2.3 billion children and adults across the world are overweight, while more than 150 million children are stunted, the estimate revealed. However, in low and middle income countries, these issues are overlapping with individuals, families and communities. Known as the double burden of malnutrition, the study explores the trends behind the intersections, the societal and the food system changes that influence it, the biological explanation and effects, and also the policy measures with a view of addressing malnutrition in all its forms.

The researchers used survey data as their tool. They used the data of low and middle income countries in the 1990s and 2010s to find out the countries that were facing the double burden of malnutrition. This means that “more than 15% of people had wasting, more than 30% were stunted, more than 20% of women had thinness and more than 20% of people were overweight.”

What the results of the analyses have to show is that more than one third of the low and middle income countries are suffering from overlapping form of malnutrition – 45 out of 123 countries in the 1990s and 48 out of 126 countries in the 2010s. The regions of the world plagued by this problem include sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, East Asia and the Pacific. In these regions 29, seven and nine countries were affected, respectively. 

During the 2010s, 14 countries of lowest incomes in the world had newly developed the double burden of malnutrition compared to the 1990s. This trend reflects increasing prevalence of overweight people in the poorest countries, while large sections of the population still face stunting, wasting and thinness. 

“Emerging malnutrition issues are a stark indicator of the people who are not protected from the factors that drive poor diets. The poorest low and middle-income countries are seeing a rapid transformation in the way people eat, drink and move at work, home, in transport and in leisure. The new nutrition reality is driven by changes to the food system, which has increased the global availability of ultra-processed foods that are linked to weight gain while also adversely affecting infant and preschooler diets. These changes include disappearing fresh food markets, increasing numbers of supermarkets, and the control of the food chain by supermarkets and global food, catering and agriculture companies in many countries,” said Popkin, the lead author of the published paper.

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Novo Nordisk has joined UNICEF in a new three-year collaborative initiative to end childhood obesity. The partners plan to do global research to share lessons and effective strategies to fight the disease, but they’re also initiating on-the-ground efforts in Latin American and Caribbean countries with high prevalence.

For instance, in Mexico, the two are piloting a breastfeeding program to encourage new mothers to adopt the practice, said Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen, president and CEO of Novo Nordisk, in an interview with FiercePharma. Breastfeeding has been shown to have positive health benefits for children, including making it less likely that they’ll end up living with obesity.

Novo Nordisk’s interest is tied to its research and treatments focused on Type 2 diabetes, which is linked to childhood obesity. Studies show childhood obesity is a strong risk factor for developing Type 2 diabetes.

“Our whole purpose is to drive change to defeat obesity and other serious chronic diseases. That’s what we do,” Jørgensen said. “Driving change is acknowledging in part that it takes much more than medicine to solve the burden of diab etes and other serious chronic diseases like obesity.”

Experts see the increasing prevalence of diabetes as unsustainable from a healthcare system perspective as well as for drugmakers. Novo Nordisk also sees prevention as a responsibility and an obligation to society as a health partner.

“We don’t want to just develop and sell medicines. We also want to be a partner for society that’s actually helping society to prevent diseases,” Jørgensen said.

“There are so many people we’re talking about here that there is still a big business opportunity for a company like ours. But for society, we have to make sure that the largest number of cases that can be prevented are prevented or the whole system collapses,” he added. “For me, it’s part of being a sustainable business that we actually help society to prevent what’s preventable and thereby provide the room to give good care for those who actually need medical intervention.”

UNICEF’s own research in the “State of the World’s Children” annual report found childhood obesity and children being overweight is on the rise almost everywhere globally. More than 40 million children under the age of five are overweight, while the number of children ages five to19 who are overweight has doubled in the past 15 years.

In the U.S., the percentage of children with obesity has more than tripled since the 1970s, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nearly 1 in 5 school children aged 6 to 19 are living with obesity. That’s why reaching children is key in efforts to fight and end obesity and in turn mitigate Type 2 diabetes, Jørgensen said. The partnership with UNICEF is important in part because of the organization’s reach and knowledge in working with worldwide governments at a policy level.

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