The rates of childhood obesity in the U.S. appear to have leveled off after a 25-year increase, says a federal study published in today's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The survey data gathered from 1999 to 2006 by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that childhood obesity in United States has reached a stable state.

Dr. David Ludwig, director of the childhood obesity program at Children’s Hospital in Boston said, “After 25 years of extraordinarily bad news about childhood obesity, this study provides a glimmer of hope.”

The study by the team of researchers led by Cynthia Ogden of the Centers for Disease Control revealed that obesity rates remained essentially unchanged from 1999 to 2006. The researchers examined height and weight measurements for 8,165 people ages 2 to 19 taken in government surveys from 2003 through 2006, allowing them to calculate body mass index, or BMI, a measure of obesity. They found that 32 percent were considered at risk for obesity, 16 percent were obese, and 11 percent were extremely obese. The rates were basically the same as those in 2003-2004.

Cynthia Ogden said, “It looks like it’s leveling off. It could finally be stabilizing. But, Ogden asserted that it’s too soon to conclude that obesity rates will decrease in the near future; Only data from 2007-2008 will show whether we should be optimistic about it, and those data won’t be available until the end of next year or early 2010. “There’s some reason to be cautiously optimistic,” she said.