Measuring a child's blood pressure, height and weight, and blood sugar levels may help predict his or her risk of developing Type 2 diabetes decades later, a new study suggests.

In the past 25 years, the prevalence of both Type 2 diabetes and obesity have increased, and the age of onset for Type 2 diabetes has also dropped, researchers said in the January issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

The team wanted to identify children at high and low risk of Type 2 diabetes, with the goal of helping prevention efforts.

To that end, John Morrison of Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center and his colleagues analyzed data from two U.S. studies. The first followed 1,067 girls enrolled at ages 9 and 10 for nine years, and the second tracked 822 schoolchildren for 22 to 30 years beginning in 1973 to 1976.

Simple office and laboratory measurements and knowing if parents had diabetes did help predict development of Type 2 diabetes decades later, they found.

Targeting diet, exercise changes

Children and teens with blood pressure, blood sugar, insulin and body mass index in the top fifth percentile — meaning 95 out of 100 children fall below this — "could be targeted for primary prevention of Type 2 diabetes mellitus through diet, exercise and possibly insulin-sensitizing drug intervention, with special focus on overweight children with positive family history of diabetes mellitus," the study's authors concluded.

On the other hand, when body mass index and blood pressure were lower than the 75th percentile and there was no Type 2 diabetes in the parents, the likelihood of children developing the condition 22 to 30 years later was only one per cent, the researchers found.

The number of people diagnosed with diabetes in Canada is expected to nearly double between 2000 and 2010, from 1.3 million to 2.5 million, according to the Canadian Diabetes Association.

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the American Heart Association, by the Taft Research Fund and by the Lipoprotein Research Fund of the Jewish Hospital of Cincinnati.