Obesity More Harmful to Heart than Smoking
A study of more than 111,000 people is one of the first to put real numbers to the risk of obesity and suggests “excess adiposity” – fat tissue – is more dangerous to the heart than smoking.
“The leading theory in cardiology right now is that the fat tissue is actually producing factors that precipitate heart attacks,” says lead author Dr. Peter McCullough, consultant cardiologist and chief of nutrition and prevention medicine at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan.
The theory is that cholesterol builds up in the coronary arteries and inflammatory or other chemicals produced by fat cells trigger the plaque to suddenly rupture, causing a blood clot to form and unleashing an acute heart attack.
But until now, earlier studies “simply just didn’t have enough patients of different body sizes having their first heart attack to really evaluate” whether obesity is associated with premature heart attacks, McCullough says.
His team analyzed data from a nationwide U.S. registry of people hospitalized for heart attack and unstable angina, or chest pain, from 2001 to 2007.
A total of 111,847 men and women who had experienced a first heart attack were included in the final analysis. They were grouped according to their body mass index, or BMI, a measure of body fat based on height and weight.
Researchers found that, the heavier the person, the younger the age of a first heart attack.
The most obese people had their heart attacks on average when they were 59.
The study involved a type of heart attack called non-ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction. They always require hospitalization and have an in-hospital fatality rate of about 10 per cent, and about 20 per cent over the next six months, McCullough says. “They are not trivial events. They account for a leading cause of patients to lose time away from work and actually seek medical disability.”
So keeping one’s weight down adds to the years one is heart attack free and how long one will live. In an age of opulence we still can’t get heart disease under control. More and more of our population is becoming obese which send up red flags portending a future of continued heart problems.
