Excess fat around the waist doubles the risk of death – a recent research
Jun 18, 2009
There is enough evidence to conclude that excess fat around the waist doubles the risk of premature death, according to a study conducted in Europe over 3,50,000 people. This study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The study offers adequate evidence to prove that people with the same body mass index may run the risk of premature death if their waist is excessively large. In other words, the larger the waist circumference, the greater the risk of death even if the body mass index is within the ‘specified range’. This is applicable also to people who are not obese as such but have a large waistline. With this study, researchers now suggest that doctors should include measuring the waistline and the hips along with the body mass index as part of the health checks done on patients. This is a suggestion made by not only Imperial College London, but the German Institute of Human Nutrition, and other research institutions all over Europe.
Waistline, when compared between subjects that had large waist i.e more than 120 cm in men and 100 cm in women with subject having smaller waist i.e. less than 80 cm in men and less than 65 cm in women, revealed that the risk of premature death is almost double in case of subjects having larger waist.
Every 5% increase in the waistline amplified the mortality risk by 17% in men and 13% in women.
The ratio of waist to hip also formed an integral part of this study. The study showed that about 98 percent of the people had a waist to hip ratio that ranged between 0.78 and 1.10 in men and between 0.66 and 0.98 in women. Given these ranges, an increase of the waist to hip ratio by 0.1 unit resulted in 34% higher mortality risk in men and a 24% risk in women.
The reason for the increased mortality is perhaps attributed to the fatty tissue that is formed around the waistline, which secretes Cytokines (hormones and compounds that are metabolically active), which contribute to the development of chronic diseases, especially cardiovascular and cancer according to the authors.
Though this study is concentrated on how the size of the waistline increase the risk of mortality even when the body mass index is within the specified range, there are enough findings available on the fact that how increased body mass index can significantly affect mortality rate.
The reaction of this study in the words of Prof. Elio Riboli, European coordinator of the EPIC study from the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at Imperial College London, is worth noting. He says “Although smaller studies have suggested a link between mortality and waist size, we were surprised to see the waist size having such a powerful effect on people’s health and premature death. Our study shows that accumulating excess fat around your middle can put your health at risk even if your weight is normal based on body mass index scores. There aren’t many simple individual characteristics that can increase a person’s risk of premature death to this extent, independently from smoking and drinking.”
Posted by admin | Tags: Weight Facts
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