More kids appear to be taking adult meds for such ailments as high blood pressure, cholesterol, acid reflux and diabetes, although some docs worry the recent rush to write prescriptions for children belies a failure to emphasize changes in exercise and diet, according to The New York Times.

The paper writes that the numbers, which were provided by Medco Health Solutions, Express Scripts and Verispan, suggest hundreds of thousands of children may be taking adult meds, a concern underscored by a controversial recommendation by the American Academy of Pediatrics that kids as young as 8 years old should be given cholesterol pills.

“I think a lot of people in pediatrics, myself included, are struggling with what is the right management to do for these kids,” Russ Rothman, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University, tells the Times. “You see elevated blood pressure, or elevated sugars, or elevated cholesterol and you try exercise and diet and you don’t see any improvement. I worry that some providers and some families are looking for the quick fix, and are going to want to start medication immediately.” Some pediatricians say they have been treating children with statins for several years.

However, Francine Kaufman remembers a patient, a 13-year-old girl, whose weight reached 267 pound, and appeared destined for the same fate as her grandmother, who lost a leg to Type 2 diabetes, the Times writes. “To control her high blood sugar level, her high blood pressure, and her high cholesterol, this young girl left my office with five medications,” Kaufman, a pediatric endocrinologist in Los Angeles, told a Senate subcommittee last week during hearings on obesity in children.

The girl stood out as unusual more than 10 years ago, but kids with the same array of problems are increasingly seen in the diabetes center where she practices at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, she added. Diet and exercise are tried first, but “lifestyle is really tough.” Some of her patients live in neighborhoods without grocery stores and attend schools that do not offer physical-ed programs, according to the Times.

“They deserve to be treated,” Kaufman said. “I think the slant from most of the media is that pediatricians are jumping to put kids on medications. That’s not true at all. Since lifestyle is so difficult, we have no other choice but to go to pharmacotherapy.”

By the way, the number of kids on these adult meds was extrapolated, and as Jim Edwards points out, this technique can suggest the actual numbers are a long way off from ‘hundreds of thousands.’