Metabolically Healthy Obesity Linked to CKD Risk

Overweight and obese individuals who are otherwise metabolically healthy are still at a heightened risk of developing chronic kidney disease (CKD), according to a recent study.

Previous research has explored the risks associated with metabolically healthy obesity—in which an individual’s BMI indicates that they are overweight or obese, but they are otherwise metabolically healthy—but the relationship between this condition and CKD is less well understood.
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To further examine this relationship, researchers conducted a prospective cohort study of 62,249 metabolically healthy young and middle-aged men and women without CKD at baseline.

Metabolic health was defined through measurement of insulin resistance less than 2.5 and the absence of other metabolic conditions.

Overall, 906 cases of CKD were reported during the study period and follow-up. Multivariable-adjusted differences in 5-year cumulative incidence of CKD were –4.0, 3.5, and 6.7 per 1000 person-years for underweight, overweight, and obese participants, respectively, compared with normal-weight participants.

“These findings show that metabolically healthy obesity is not a harmless condition and that the obese phenotype, regardless of metabolic abnormalities, can adversely affect renal function,” they concluded.

—Michael Potts

Reference:
Chang Y, Ruy S, Choi Y, et al. Metabolically healthy obesity and development of chronic kidney disease: A cohort study. Ann Intern Med. 2016 February 9 [epub ahead of print]. doi:10.7326/M15-1323.