Research presented at the American Heart Association's annual meeting that was held in New Orleans on Tuesday has revealed that obese teenagers’ arteries resembled the ones representative of people thirty years older than the adolescents.

A team of scientists at the University of Missouri Kansas City School of Medicine and Children's Mercy Hospital have conducted the study that led to the aforementioned conclusion, having used ultrasound in order to measure the thickness of the inner walls of the carotid arteries. The latter is the artery that supplies the head and neck with oxygenated blood.

Looking at 70 children aged six to nineteen years old, researchers found that the carotid artery intima-media thickness (CIMT), which is used to measure atherosclerosis, was increased in the ones whose body mass index (BMI) ranged from 25 to 30. A BMI that exceeds 25 suggests that a person is overweight, while one above 30 renders them to fall into the category of obese people.

A larger than normal CIMT translates as fatty build-up in the arteries, which can eventually lead to a heart attack or a stroke, thus exposing teenagers to high risk of developing cardiovascular disease even from an early age.

The average age of the participants in the study was 13, while half of them were male teenagers. Results showed that obese children who also had high levels of triglyceride in the blood were the most prone to register an advanced vascular age, the thickness of their arteries rendering the latter to exceed the adolescents’ chronological age by almost three decades.