Children may be able to tell their parents a thing or two about their heart disease risk.

According to a study led by Dr. Evelyn Cohen Reis, of Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, parents of youngsters who are obese and have high blood pressure or elevated triglycerides are likely to have the same issues.

"What we took from that was, 'Gosh, you could look at the children's health and help predict whether the parents are at increased risk of heart disease,' " Dr. Reis said.

Children tend to see doctors regularly for school and sports physicals and the like, while adults do not have such mandatory requirements, she noted.

But "if we see that a child has identifiable risk factors, we should turn to the parents and say, 'This puts you at greater risk [and] you should go get checked out,' " Dr. Reis said.

Similarly, physicians who care for adults may get a heads-up on problems by asking about the health of their children, she added.

"The child is sort of an index case for the family's cardiovascular disease risk," Dr. Reis said.

For the study, which was published online in the December issue of Pediatrics, researchers took measurements including weight, body mass index, blood pressure and triglyceride levels of 108 parents and their 141 children.

Parents of children with hypertension were nearly 15 times more likely to have the condition than parents of children with normal blood pressure.

Also, parents of obese children were six times more likely to be obese than those of normal-weight children, and parents whose children had elevated triglycerides were five times more likely also to have elevated triglycerides than parents of children with normal levels.

Triglyceride levels are not routinely checked in children, although guidelines recommend the testing in obese adolescents, Dr. Reis said.

Parents sometimes single out children with weight or blood pressure problems, imposing diet and exercise changes upon them while maintaining the status quo for the rest of the family.

But "this is a great opportunity to help prevent heart disease among families long before it really progresses to the stage of being symptomatic," Dr. Reis said. "The entire family should be ideally exercising better and eating better. There's a very practical application to these findings."

Of course, just because a child gets a clean bill of health doesn't mean the parent will, she pointed out. Heart disease and its risk factors are more common in adults.

"I am totally not surprised by their findings because we've had similar findings before," said Dr. Prapti Kanani, a pediatric cardiologist at Allegheny General Hospital.

A study by University of Iowa researchers that began in the 1970s and tracked thousands of school-age children found more cardiovascular disease deaths among relatives of those who had elevated cholesterol levels, were overweight or had high blood pressure, Dr. Kanani said.

So pediatricians should advise screening for parents of children with those risk factors, and doctors for adults shouldn't forget the children, she said.

"It's a very important point," Dr. Kanani said. "More often than not, it doesn't happen. We need to bring forward that awareness."