Summary

Over the past 20 years, the rate of obesity or overweightedness (>95th percentile for age and gender) has doubled among children and tripled among adolescents, affecting more than 5 million of them in the United States alone [O'Brien PE et al. JAMA 2010]. To date, there are no medical therapies that provide significant and durable weight loss [Barnett SJ. Curr Opin Pediatr 2011].