Your Waist Size Can Predict Your Chances of Heart Failure

It’s well known that obesity is linked to heart failure, but the actual relationship between overweight and the heart condition hasn’t been explored. This has been rectified by physicians from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and published in the journal Circulation: Heart Failure. The findings are clearly of importance to the 66% of US adults who are overweight or obese.

The data for analysis came from two Swedish population studies of 36,800 women and 43,500 men, aged 45 to 83. Questionnaires administered in 1998 reported height, weight, and waist circumference. Hospitalizations or deaths due to heart failure during the next 7 years were obtained from national registers.

The first analysis showed that 34% of the women and 46% of the men were overweight, while 11% of the women and 10% of the men were obese. Further exploration found that in the women with a body mass index (BMI) of 25 (which is just within the normal range), a 10 cm (4 inch) higher waist measurement was associated with a 15% higher heart failure rate. In men with a BMI of 25, this increase in waist measurement was linked with a 16% higher heart failure rate.

Women and men with a BMI of 30 and a 10 cm (4 inch) higher waist measurement had an 18% or 16% higher heart failure rate, respectively.

Further analyses showed that in men, each one-unit increase in BMI was linked to a 4% higher heart failure rate, no matter what the waist size. In women, BMI was only linked with increased heart failure rates in subjects with the largest waists. In both sexes, the links between waist or BMI and heart failure rates declined with age. (That’s about the only bit of good news in this study!)