Obesity Troubles More Than the Heart
Physical limitations and higher death rates also linked to weight

(HealthDay News) -- That which doesn't kill you doesn't always make you stronger.

Take being overweight. Two recent studies on the subject, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association , found that extra weight might not shorten a person's life span, but all that extra weight will probably make day-to-day living harder.

"People know that obesity places them at increased risk of diabetes and heart disease, but I think people don't always think about how the increased weight may affect quality of life and doing the things you want to do," the author of one of the studies, Dawn Alley, a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, told HealthDay .

"Obese elderly people have a higher risk of being disabled, and the gap is increasing," Alley said. "Obese older persons are experiencing a potentially preventable impairment. This is just one more reason we need to be concerned about obesity."

More than 30 percent of American adults are currently obese, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, meaning they have a body mass index (BMI) of more than 30. Being obese increases the likelihood that a person will have high blood pressure, arthritis, high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes, stroke, heart disease, some cancers, gallbladder disease and more, according to the CDC.

One of the studies looked at causes of death based on weight. It found that being overweight was not associated with an increased risk of death from cancer or cardiovascular disease. Being overweight, which correlates to a BMI of 25 to 29.9, actually decreased the risk of death from non-cancer, non-cardiovascular causes.

However, obesity was associated with an increased rate of death from cardiovascular disease and with obesity-related cancers, such as breast cancer.

"The message here is that it's not just that if you're heavier, you're at a higher risk of death from all diseases. It's a little more complex than that," the study's author, Katherine Flegal, a senior research scientist at the National Center for Health Statistics at the CDC, told HealthDay .

Alley's study focused its research on people over 60 and assessed two measures: functional impairment and activities of daily living. Functional impairment included the inability to bend over and pick something up, walk a quarter of a mile, walk up 10 stairs, stand from an armless chair and lift 10 pounds. Activities of daily living included such basic skills as dressing yourself and being able to feed yourself.

Obese people were 43 percent more likely to be functionally impaired than were their normal-weight counterparts, according to the study. Additionally, obese people had double the risk of having an impairment related to the activities of daily living, compared with normal-weight people.

On the Web

To learn more about the effects of being overweight or obese, check out information from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

SOURCES: HealthDay News ; Dawn Alley, Ph.D., Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Katherine Flegal, Ph.D., senior research scientist, National Center for Health Statistics, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta; Nov. 7, 2007, Journal of the American Medical Association ; U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (www.cdc.gov)
Author: Serena Gordon
Publication Date: Oct. 31, 2008
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