Research finds that higher hip and waist measurements are more strongly associated with heart attacks
The key to good heart health may not lie so much in the kilograms as in the inches.
Higher waist and hip size are more strongly associated with heart attack risk than overall obesity, especially among women, according to research published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, the Open Access Journal of the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association.
This study suggests that the differences in the quantity and distribution of fat tissue not only result in differences in body shape between women and men, but may also have differential implications for the risk of heart attack in later life
In a study of nearly 500,000 adults (aged 40-69) from the United Kingdom, researchers found that while general obesity and obesity specifically around the abdomen each have profound harmful effects on heart attack risk in both sexes, women were more negatively impacted by higher waist circumference and waist-to-hip ratio than men.
This study suggests that the differences in the quantity and distribution of fat tissue not only result in differences in body shape between women and men, but may also have differential implications for the risk of heart attack in later life, researchers noted. India is currently battling rising incidence of non-communicable diseases including cardiovascular diseases – Indians are known to be prone to truncal obesity given their sedentary lifestyles.
“Our findings support the notion that having proportionally more fat around the abdomen (a characteristic of the apple shape) appears to be more hazardous than more visceral fat which is generally stored around the hips (i.e., the pear shape),” said lead author Sanne Peters, Research Fellow in Epidemiology at the George Institute for Global Health at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.
Additional research on sex differences in obesity may yield insights into the biological mechanisms and could inform sex-specific interventions to treat and halt the obesity epidemic.
