BATON ROUGE — More than one in five children in Louisiana are considered obese and a years-long clinical trial co-led by LSU's Penington Biomedical Reasearch Center in Baton Rouge is showing real results in changing that.

Nearly 36% of Louisiana children are considered overweight or obese, and the state ranks 47th out of 50 states for that rate, according to America's Health Rankings.

A major clinical trial called the TEAM UP study, which stands for Treatment Efforts Addressing Child Weight Management by Unifying Patients, Parents and Providers was co-led by Pennington with Washington University, the University of Rochester and the American Academy of Pediatrics. It tested delivering family-based behavioral treatments for childhood obesity directly through local pediatricians and primary care offices.

The trial involved 730 children across the country between the ages of 6 and 15. Of those, 270 were in Louisiana.

Half of the families were insured by Medicaid and one in five reported food insecurity. Other children in the study had ADHD, anxiety or depression.

Pennington Biomedical professor Dr. Amanda Staiano says research had already created safe and effective programs to help kids lose weight, but those programs weren't reaching doctors' offices or families.

"About half of the kids in the study achieved what's considered a meaningful weight reduction," said Staiano. "So that means improvements in their blood pressure and their metabolic health. And also we saw that the family's behaviors and household practices were changing. And that was also exciting because it's not a short term solution."

Researchers are following the children through their electronic records for 10 years after the study.

The programs are available through local doctors' offices and are covered by insurance in many cases. Staiano says the family-based approach can also work for children approved for GLP-1 drugs or weight loss surgery to help maintain weight loss.

More information about the study and how to get a child into a program like this is available here.