Testing 2-year-olds for high cholesterol
From Time magazine:
Making decisions about your health is never easy, and things get even harder when the choices involve children. That's why the latest recommendation from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) to widen cholesterol-testing to include kids as young as 2 is shaking up doctors and parents alike. The Academy is also urging doctors to consider treating young patients from families with a history of abnormally high cholesterol levels — a major contributor to heart disease — with medications known as statins.
Taken together, these policies represent a desperate and perhaps even radical attempt to contain the heart disease, diabetes and other metabolic consequences of an obesity epidemic that doctors believe has spiraled out of control.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1821153,00.html?xid=rss-t...
Testing kids as young as 2 sounds awfully drastic, but perhaps it’s the kind of wake-up call we need to stem the tide of obesity in Mississippi.








