People who are overweight or obese and have a high waist circumference have a significantly increased 10-year fatal and nonfatal cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk, report researchers.
“What this study shows is the substantial effect that overweight and obesity have on cardiovascular disease, whether fatal or non-fatal,” said lead author Ineke van Dis (Wageningen University, The Hague, The Netherlands).
“In the near future the impact of obesity on the burden of heart disease will be even greater,” she added.
The team used anthropometric data from MORGEN (Monitoring Project on Chronic Disease Risk Factors) collected between 1993 and 1997 from a general population sample of 20,500 men and women from The Netherlands aged 20–65 years.
The participants were followed-up for a mean period of 10 years for incidence of nonfatal and fatal CVD.
Overall, the risk for nonfatal CVD was about 10 times higher than that for fatal CVD.
Compared with normal-weight participants, those who were obese (body mass index [BMI] of 30 kg/m2 or above) had a four- and two-fold higher relative risk for fatal and nonfatal CVD, respectively.
Similar associations were found for individuals with high waist circumferences (at or above 88 cm for women and 102 cm for men) compared with those with normal waist circumferences (below 80 cm for women and 94 cm for men).
In participants considered to be overweight (25 kg/m2 or above), 54% of fatal and 25% of nonfatal CVD could be attributed to overweight and obesity.
van Dis and co-authors estimated that at the population level one in three fatal and one in seven nonfatal CVD cases could be attributed to overweight and obesity.
“For consumer groups and our national heart foundations, these findings underline the need for policies and activities to prevent overweight in the general population,” concluded van Dis.
“I think that general practitioners and cardiologists can do even more to tackle these problems, especially in obese patients under 65 years, as highlighted in this study.”
The results of this study are published in the European Journal of Cardiovascular Prevention and Rehabilitation.