Overweight More Than Doubles Risk of Cardiovascular Multimorbidity

The risk of cardiometabolic multimorbidity—the presence of at least 2 cardiometabolic diseases, including type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, and stroke) is significantly higher among overweight and obese individuals compared with those who have healthy body mass index (BMI), according to a recent study.

For their study, the researchers pooled individual-participant data from 120,813 adults who participated in 16 prospective cohort studies in the US and Europe. All participants were 35 years old or older, had BMI data available at baseline, and did not have type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, and stroke at baseline.
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The participants were classified into 4 BMI categories: healthy, overweight, obese, and severe obesity, based upon the WHO recommendations.

During a mean follow-up of 10.7 years, 1627 cases of multimorbidity were identified. Following adjustments for sociodemographic and lifestyle factors, the risk of developing cardiometabolic multimorbidity in overweight individuals was twice as high as healthy weight individuals. Obese and severely obese individuals were 5 and 15 times as likely to have cardiometabolic multimorbidity as healthy weight individuals, respectively.

“In view of the excess risk of death attributable to cardiometabolic multimorbidity, it is important that clinicians and their patients are informed that high BMI not only increases the risk of diabetes and vascular disease separately, but also of their more severe, comorbid forms. Our data support recommendations that clinicians treating overweight or obese patients with vascular disease screen for the development of diabetes.”

—Michael Potts

Reference:

Kivimaki M, Kuosma E, Ferrie JE, et al. Overweight, obesity, and risk of cardiometabolic multimorbidity: pooled analysis of individual-level data for 120 813 adults from 16 cohort studies from the USA and Europe [published online May 19, 2017]. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S2468-2667(17)30074-9.