It has been widely known that being overweight and/or obese have negative health effects on the person. A new study added further backing to this fact with a new finding which suggests that obesity in early adulthood might cause serious effects in later life.
According to the study by Stephanie Chiuve, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA, women who are overweight and obese during early adulthood are at a high risk of experiencing sudden cardiac death, Medical News Today (MNT) reported.
Specifically, the researchers found that women who were overweight or those with a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 25-30 were 1.5 times higher to experience sudden cardiac death in the following two years than those who have a healthy BMI. Meanwhile, obese women were two times higher to have a sudden cardiac death.
In order to arrive at this conclusion, the researchers analyzed the data of 72,484 women who were part of the 1980-2012 Nurses' Health Study. The information of the participants, such as weight and height, were collected at study baseline during the age of 18.
Such information were used to get the BMI of the participants while a follow up every two years has been made during the duration of the 32-year study in order to determine the changes in the participants' information.
Assessing the information obtained, the researchers also found that women who were overweight or obese during the age of 18 have an increased risk of sudden cardiac death all throughout the the study's duration.
Moreover, it was highlighted that the risk of having a sudden cardiac death did not substantially decrease even after losing weight.
The researchers also discovered that this risk has been higher for those women who gained at least 44 pounds during early to mid-adulthood.
"We found that it is important to maintain a healthy weight throughout adulthood as a way to minimize the risk of sudden cardiac death," Chiuve said.
The researchers, however, pointed that more research is needed to be done to further support this claim especially that the information analyzed were from white women. Thus, differences may rise if information from various ethnicity were to be analyzed.
According to the World Health Organization, obesity all over the world has more than doubled since 1980. It also cited that, in 2014, 1.9 billion adults, aged 18 above, were overweight while 13 percent of it or 600 million adults were obese.
More studies like this one reported are being conducted to determine the effects of being overweight and obese in various aspects of life. Just recently, Latinos Post also reported a study which discovered that there is discrimination in employment and shopping towards overweight and obese men.