Physician and Paediatric Clinical Epidemiologist Andrew Agbaje of the University of Eastern Finland has been recognised with the New Investigator Award in Childhood Obesity by the European Association for the Study of Obesity, EASO, and the Novo Nordisk Foundation. The award includes a research grant of 300,000 Danish Kroner, i.e., approximately 40,000 euros.
Andrew Agbaje received the award for discovering arterial stiffness as a novel risk factor for paediatric obesity and insulin resistance, identifying adolescence as the critical time to interrupt fat mass-insulin resistance pathologic cycle, and demonstrating light-intensity physical activity as a highly effective antidote for reversing excessive fat deposit induced by childhood sedentariness.
Obesity is a complex chronic disease that impacts health and can lead to increased risk of diabetes, heart disease and certain cancers. Obesity is responsible for an estimated five million deaths worldwide each year. In the adult population, the prevalence of obesity has more than doubled since 1990, and more than quadrupled in children and adolescents since 1990. Currently, more than 890 million adults, and more than 160 million children, are living with obesity.
“This is an unprecedented recognition of our effort to improve the understanding and prevention of cardiometabolic diseases in children and adolescents. I am grateful to EASO, a federation of 36 European countries’ professional associations, and the Novo-Nordisk Foundation for this award,” says Agbaje.
“More importantly, we have recently discovered that waist-to-height ratio is an inexpensive alternative for screening, detecting, and diagnosing childhood obesity that could replace body mass index (BMI). BMI fails to distinguish fat mass from muscle mass and has misclassified children as overweight or obese even, when children are within normal range of fat mass,” Agbaje says.
Last week, Agbaje gave an interview to EASO, proposing a new obesity cut point that could be adopted in policy statements and guidelines in Europe for diagnosing childhood obesity based on waist-to-height ratio.
The waist-to-height ratio measures specifically fat mass.
The official award ceremony will be held in Venice, Italy, on 14 May during the 2024 European Congress on Obesity where Agbaje will present his research findings. Other awards are the EASO-Novo Nordisk Foundation Obesity Prize for Excellence to be presented to Professor Antje Körner of the University of Leipzig and Helmholtz Institute of Metabolic, Obesity and Vascular Research (HI-MAG) of Helmholtz Munich. In addition to Andrew Agbaje’s Childhood Obesity award, the New Investigator Awards will also be presented to Postdoctoral Fellow Birgitta van der Kolk of the University of Helsinki in recognition of her research in Basic Science, to Tenure Track Researcher Borja Martinez Tellez of the University of Almería and Torrecardenas University Hospital in recognition of his work in Clinical Research, and to Research Fellow Laura Gray of the University of Sheffield in recognition of her research in Public Health.
For further information, please contact:
Andrew Agbaje, MD, MPH, PhD, Cert. Clinical Research (Harvard), Principal Investigator (urFIT-child). Institute of Public Health and Clinical Nutrition, School of Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio, Finland. andrew.agbaje(a)uef.fi, +358 46 896 5633
Honorary Research Fellow – Children's Health and Exercise Research Centre, Public Health and Sports Sciences Department, Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK. a.agbaje@exeter.ac.uk
https://uefconnect.uef.fi/en/person/andrew.agbaje/
Changing the way we measure childhood obesity: EASO conversation with Andrew Agbaje
