Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Obesity Not Always Linked To Higher Cardiovascular Risk

“Two studies, one from Germany and another from the US published this week, suggest that obese people do not always carry an increased risk of heart disease, while some individuals of normal weight do. The clue appeared to lie in how body fat was distributed, for example fat in the abdomen, as indicated by a larger waist circumference, was a consistent risk factor in both studies. The first paper describes how researchers at the University of Tübingen in Germany studied 314 people aged 18 to 69 (the average age was 45) by measuring their total body fat, their visceral fat (the fat around the abdomen and internal organs), and subcutaneous fat (fat under the skin) with magnetic resonance tomography. The participants also underwent an oral glucose tolerance test to measure their insulin resistance. ‘Our data suggest that ectopic [misplaced] fat accumulation in the liver may be more important than visceral fat in the determination of such a beneficial phenotype in obesity. ’In the second study, researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York, studied body weight and indices of cardiometabolic abnormality in 5,440 people who took part in the National Health and Nutritional Examination Surveys (NHNES) between 1999 and 2004. ‘These data show that a considerable proportion of overweight and obese US adults are metabolically healthy, whereas a considerable proportion of normal-weight adults express a clustering of cardiometabolic abnormalities.’”

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/118023.php

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