Overweight or obesity in children aged 0 to 6 and the risk of adult metabolic syndrome: A systematic review and meta‐analysis

Aims and objectives To identify an association between overweight or obesity in early childhood and metabolic syndrome in adults. Background Early childhood overweight or obesity is important because it can predict metabolic syndrome in adulthood. A longer period of overweight or obesity leads to the accumulation of more risk factors. However, there are insufficient and inconsistent studies on this issue. Design A systematic review and meta‐analysis. Methods We followed the Meta‐Analysis of Observational Studies in Epidemiology guideline, MEDLINE, EMBASE, Cochrane library and CINAHL electronic databases as well as reference lists of included studies were searched, without published date restriction. We used the Newcastle‐Ottawa Scale to assess the quality of the observational studies in the systematic review, and the meta‐analysis was performed using random‐effects models. Results All of the included studies were published from 2008–2014, and the participants of this study were only Asians or Europeans. A total of 12 results from five studies were included in the meta‐analysis. Overweight or obesity in early childhood was associated with a higher risk of adult metabolic syndrome compared with the controls. When confirmed in each age group (at birth, 0–2 and 2–6 years), there was a statistically significant difference before and after the age of 2 years. As a result of the meta‐regression, when the age of the children increased, the effect size of adult metabolic syndrome for overweight or obesity also increased. Conclusions The results confirm that the aetiology of metabolic syndrome includes long‐term impacts from the early stage of life and indicate that early intervention for overweight or obesity is needed. Relevance to clinical practice: these findings could help community and clinical health nurses recognize the risk of overweight or obesity in early life, and provide evidence to develop and implement the preventive intervention for early childhood.