“You see elevated blood pressure, or elevated sugars, or elevated cholesterol and you try exercise and diet and you don’t see any improvement,” Dr. Rothman said. “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.

Dr. David Collier, director of a pediatric weight management center at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C., an area where 45 percent of the children are overweight, is among doctors who support the recent recommendations that statins may be warranted in some children as young as 8. “We have been using statins for two or three years now,” he said.

One of his statin patients, he said, was a 6-year-old girl.

Dr. Collier, who describes his location as “right smack dab in the middle of the stroke belt,” believes that aggressive therapy is needed to prevent a health crisis. “It’s hard to overstate the size of the problem,” he said.

Dr. Francine R. Kaufman remembers a patient, a 13-year-old girl, whose weight had ballooned to 267 pounds. The teenager appeared destined for the same fate as her grandmother, who lost a leg to Type 2 diabetes.

“To control her high blood sugar level, her high blood pressure, and her high cholesterol, this young girl left my office with five medications,” Dr. 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 children with the same array of problems are increasingly seen in the diabetes center where she practices at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Dr. Kaufman said.

Diet and exercise are tried first, but “lifestyle is really tough,” Dr. Kaufman said. Some of her patients live in neighborhoods without grocery stores and attend schools that do not offer physical education programs.