{"id":6838,"date":"2011-03-10T19:16:14","date_gmt":"2011-03-11T00:16:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/?p=6838"},"modified":"2011-07-19T17:44:30","modified_gmt":"2011-07-19T21:44:30","slug":"obesity-and-cardiovascular-risk-does-size-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/2011\/03\/10\/obesity-and-cardiovascular-risk-does-size-matter\/","title":{"rendered":"Obesity and Cardiovascular Risk: Does Size Matter?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A very large new study finds that obesity\u00a0\u2014 no matter how it is calculated \u2014 is not an important independent predictor of cardiovascular disease. A report from the Emerging Risk Factors Collaboration <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thelancet.com\/journals\/lancet\/article\/PIIS0140-6736(11)60105-0\/abstract\">published online in the<em> Lancet<\/em><\/a> analyzed individual records from more than 220,000 people without known cardiovascular disease and found that none of the traditional methods to categorize obesity \u2014 BMI, waist circumference, and waist-to-hip ratio \u2014 provided significant additional information about CV risk beyond that already provided by systolic blood pressure, diabetes, and lipids.<\/p>\n<p>The authors wrote that their finding &#8220;does not, of course, diminish the importance of adiposity as a major modifiable determinant of cardiovascular disease&#8221; but that &#8220;because excess adiposity is a major determinant of the intermediate risk factors&#8230; our findings underscore the importance of controlling adiposity to help prevent cardiovascular disease.&#8221; The authors also say that their results &#8220;reliably refute previous recommendations to adopt baseline waist-to-hip ratio instead of BMI as the principal clinical measure of adiposity.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>In <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thelancet.com\/journals\/lancet\/article\/PIIS0140-6736%2811%2960239-0\/fulltext\">an accompanying comment<\/a>, Rachel Huxley and David Jacobs Jr. write that &#8220;BMI\u00a0continues to be useful as an indicator of adiposity&#8221; and should be &#8220;used\u00a0with good clinical judgment.&#8221; However, they note, &#8220;size still matters&#8230; but not in the way we once thought.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A very large new study finds that obesity\u00a0\u2014 no matter how it is calculated \u2014 is not an important independent predictor of cardiovascular disease. A report from the Emerging Risk Factors Collaboration published online in the Lancet analyzed individual records from more than 220,000 people without known cardiovascular disease and found that none of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":196,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[685,329,284],"class_list":["post-6838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prevention","tag-bmi","tag-cardiovascular-risk","tag-obesity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/196"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6838\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}