Belly fat deadlier than obesity alone: study
- November 12, 2015, 12:29 pm
- Breaking News
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QUETTA: People who weigh a normal amount when they step on the scale may be at higher risk of dying in the medium term if their fat is concentrated in the abdomen, say doctors who want everyone to use a tape measure to measure themselves.
Researchers have long suspected the body mass index, or BMI, that tells you how appropriate your weight is to your height isn't a good measure of body fatness — particularly fat that accumulates in the belly and within abdominal organs and leads to inflammation, glucose intolerance and other complications that increase the risk of cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes.
"There are many different names for it," said study co-author Thais Coutinho, a cardiologist at the Ottawa Heart Institute. "There's the apple shape as opposed to the pear shape, there's a muffin top, there's a beer belly. A spare tire. But basically, it is exactly what it sounds like: if somebody has a disproportionately large abdomen compared to other parts of the body."
Coutinho and her co-authors from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., assessed the five- and 10-year mortality risk in men and women with normal BMIs and central obesity compared with those who are overweight or obese based on BMI. The study included more than 15,000 participants who were followed for an average of 14.3 years as part of the U.S.-based Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, known as NHANES III.
"We found that the group of patients that actually has the highest risk of dying were precisely the patients who had normal BMI, so these are people who are not necessarily heavy for their height, but they were centrally obese," Coutinho said.
The study is published in Monday's issue of the scientific journal Annals of Internal Medicine.
For a man with central obesity and normal BMI, the mortality risk was double that of those who were overweight or obese based on BMI alone. For women with central obesity and normal BMI, the mortality risk was nearly 1.5 times greater than for those with a problematic BMI but without fat concentrated in the middle.
