Overweight Adults Are Prone to Cardiac Issues

The bigger the circle, the higher the chance you’ll drop instantly dead with a heart attack.

After earlier in the week researchers published a paper describing a protein that inhibits weight loss in overweight people, more bad news come in the form of another study, this one proving that overweight adults are prone to cardiac issues.

The study, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology: Clinical Electrophysiology, has collected and analyzed data for over 72,000 healthy women, from 1980 to 2012. The decades long data helped the researchers to find out more specifically the cardiac risks an overweight person is exposed to throughout their adulthood.

The scientists analyzed the data belonging to the 72,000 women, measuring their body mass indexes (BMIs), as well as their weight gain. The data was then compared to the women’s risk for sudden cardiac death, coronary heart disease and non-fatal heart attacks.

Out of the 72,000 women, 445 of them suffered from sudden cardiac death, 1,286 contracted a coronary heart disease, and 2,272 of them recorded non-fatal heart attacks. The data was of course measured in relation to the women’s BMIs, giving the researchers an idea of what to expect from healthy, but overweight or even obese adults.

The results were more than troubling.

The lead author of the study, Stephanie Chiuve, said that over three quarters of the reported cases of sudden cardiac death do not stem from patients deemed of highly likely to suffer from a coronary condition, but from otherwise healthy, but overweight adults.

Overall, subjects that reported a higher body mass index in their adulthoods showed a much greater risk of sudden cardiac death. Overweight women turned out to be 1.5 times more likely to suffer from sudden cardiac death over the next 2 years, while obese women were two times as likely.

Even more troubling was the fact that weight gain in the women’s early to mid-adulthood was a sign that the woman was more likely to suffer from sudden cardiac death regardless of her BMI was at the age of 18, while the risk was twice as large for women who gained over 44 pounds.

Even though the women’s BMIs were not correlated very accurately to the other two affections, coronary heart disease and non-fatal heart attacks, the data is still more than enough to urge something to be done regarding the increasing levels of obesity measured not only in the United States, but also worldwide.

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