Abstract 15439: Obese Children With Concentric Hypertrophy and Impaired Cardiac Strain: A Potentially High-risk Subgroup Identified With Cardiac Magnetic Resonance

Objectives: Obesity affects nearly one in five children and is associated with increased risk of premature death. Heart disease may contribute to this premature death. We aimed to use cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) to comprehensively assess the prevalence and severity of heart disease in obese children, with the hypothesis that obese children have cardiac remodeling and impaired cardiac function compared to healthy weight children. Methods and Results: Twenty obese (age 12 ± 3 years, 60% female) and 20 healthy weight children (age 13 ± 3 years, 50% female) underwent CMR, including both standard cine imaging and displacement encoded imaging, for a complete assessment of left ventricular (LV) structure and function. After adjusting for age, obese children had a 27% increase in LV mass (p <0.001, Figure 1A) and a 12% increase in LV thickness (obese = 5.5 ± 0.7 mm, healthy = 5.0 ± 0.7 mm, p = 0.01). This evidence of cardiac remodeling was present in obese children as young as age 8. Forty percent of obese c...