overweight and obese adolescents may be more likely to have physical problems than their normal-weight peers but they don’t seem to be worse off mentally, according to national study findings.

“Using a nationally representative sample, we found that obesity in adolescence is linked with poor physical quality of life,” write study author Dr. Karen C. Swallen, of the University of Wisconsin, and her co-authors in the medical journal Pediatrics.

“However, in the general population, adolescents with above normal body mass did not report poorer emotional, school, or social functioning, “they add.

Today, about one out of every seven children and adolescents in the US are overweight. One study found that the prevalence of overweight and obesity increased by up to 120 percent, particularly among black and Hispanic children and adolescents, between 1986 and 1998. Overweight youngsters are known to be at risk for various health problems including diabetes and heart disease.

Swallen and her team investigated the association between obesity and health-related quality of life using data collected from more than 4,000 students in grades 7 to 12 who were involved in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.

The researchers found that overweight adolescents were more than twice as likely to have worse self-reported health than their normal-weight peers. Obese adolescents were more than four times as likely to report poorer health.

Overweight and obese adolescents were also more likely than their peers to have difficulty performing household chores, problems with personal care and hygiene or some other type of functional limitation. Yet, the same was true of underweight adolescents, the authors note.

In fact, study participants’ ability to perform various tasks without any limitations decreased as their body mass index moved farther away from the norm - whether towards overweight or underweight, the study findings show. Body mass index is a measure of weight that takes height into consideration.

While being overweight or obese did not appear to influence most study participants’ emotional health, Depression or school or social functioning, it did have a “deleterious effect” on depression, self-esteem and school and social functioning among the youngest adolescents, the researchers note.

Obese 12- to 14-year-olds, for example, were more than three times as likely to say they had low self-esteem and more than twice as likely to report poor school/social functioning as were their normal-weight peers. They were also up to three times as likely to be depressed, the report indicates.

Why the same was not true among the older adolescents is unknown. It may be that young Americans are “more tolerant of weight differences” than their same-age peers were in the past, or that being overweight is simply more common among adolescents. It is also possible that the adolescents studied did not report all of the health problems they experienced, Swallen and her team speculate.

SOURCE: Pediatrics, February 2005.