tackling childhood obesity
Donald Dengel has discovered how overweight kids can turn around their health
Donald Dengel was alarmed by the large number of overweight or obese children he encountered while swimming with his two young daughters at the pool 11 years ago. He had already been studying metabolic syndrome in overweight and obese patients at the University of Michigan for a decade at that point. Concerned for his daughters’ generation, in 2000 Dengel seized an opportunity to move his family to the Twin Cities and switch his research focus to pediatrics at the University of Minnesota.
As a new member of the School of Kinesiology, associate professor Dengel immediately began pursuing collaborations with the University’s strong Department of Pediatrics; as well as with the School of Public Health; and the College of Food, Agricultural, and Natural Resource Sciences.
“There weren’t a lot of partnerships with the folks in medicine back then,” he says. “So I got right to work knocking on doors.”
Metabolic syndrome is the clustering together of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases in an individual. Often caused by obesity, metabolic syndrome strikes adults and children alike and can cause diabetes, heart disease, and stroke.
“In the 1960s, when I was a kid, only 4 percent of adults were overweight,” says Dengel. “Now that figure is 65 percent. At that rate of increase, the 15 percent of kids that are obese in 2010 should swell to 89 percent of adults in 2050. That’s almost everyone! Our current health care system could not handle the costs and demand on caregivers that those numbers would create.”
Dengel has discovered that overweight and obese kids who begin to exercise and eat right can completely recover their vascular use, whereas adults can only improve.
“There seems to be a window of opportunity when kids can completely turn their situation around, as if there never was a problem,” he says. “However, it appears that all changes at puberty, so it is obviously very important that we promote exercise and healthy eating and weight goals while children are young.”
Since 2005 Dengel has also studied the common incidence of metabolic syndrome in survivors of childhood cancers such as leukemia. His research investigates whether the cancer itself, or the treatments of cancer, or parents’ attempt to protect their children—who have weakened immune systems following chemotherapy and radiation treatment—may bring on the syndrome. Dengel’s research has revealed that chemotherapy damages the cardiovascular system, making the cancer survivor susceptible to a variety of metabolic and cardiovascular diseases.
“Today 80 to 90 percent of children survive childhood leukemia,” says Dengel. “Once these children are finished with their cancer treatment, they aren’t really finished with their lifetime of medical treatment. The question is how to work with this large population of survivors. We’ve added years to their lives but we’ve weakened them, and now we need to make sure that those added years are quality years.”
Dengel directs the Human Performance Core of the Clinical and Translational Science Institute, an organization that integrates the University of Minnesota's Academic Health Center and other University resources with community partners to create a comprehensive statewide network for clinical and translational science. He is a fellow of the American Heart Association and of the American College of Sports Medicine, from whom he received the prestigious New Investigator Award in 1997.
Story by Brigitt Martin | Photo by Justin Evidon | September 2010
