28-07-2025
- Health
- South China Morning Post
Will your child become obese as an adult? New tool identifies those genetically at risk
Scientists have developed a tool that can measure a child's risk of becoming obese in later life.
This new resource may one day mean that those at highest risk will get targeted support to prevent them from becoming obese in the first place.
The tool, which assesses a person's
genetic risk of obesity , works twice as well as any other obesity risk predictor, academics said.
As well as identifying children at risk, it can also predict how well obese adults will respond to targeted weight-loss programmes.
Academics used data on the genetic variations from more than 5 million people to create a tool called a polygenic risk score, which analyses millions of DNA variations to predict a person's susceptibility to becoming overweight.
The scientists found that the tool could successfully predict weight gain during childhood from the age of just two and a half. Photo: Shutterstock
The tool could explain 17.6 per cent of the variation in the body mass index score (BMI) – calculated from a person's weight in kilograms divided by the square of their height in metres – from people in the UK, they found.
