Heart risks of obesity reduced with exercise
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Women who are overweight or obese can reduce their risk of heart disease by exercising more, results of a new study indicate.
However, “even high quantities of physical activity are unlikely to fully reverse the risk of (heart disease) in overweight and obese women without concurrent weight loss,” Dr. Amy R. Weinstein and colleagues report in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
Weinstein, at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and her associates in Boston studied the effects of obesity and inactivity on heart disease using data from the Women’s Health Study, which included 39,000 women age 45 years or older who were free of heart disease, stroke, cancer, and diabetes when the study began.
At their first examination, 34 percent of the subjects were considered physically active, defined as engaging in roughly 30 minutes of moderate-intensity activity 5 days a week. According to their body mass index, 51 percent of the subjects were normal weight, 31 percent overweight, and 18 percent were obese.
Over an 11-year period, 948 women experienced a heart attack or another form of heart disease.
Further analysis showed that body weight and physical activity acted independently from each other to affect the risk of heart disease.
As might be expected, physically active subjects with normal body weights had the lowest risk of heart disease. Compared with this group, inactive, obese subjects were 2.53-times more likely to develop heart disease. Individuals in the other activity/weight classes had intermediate risks.
In both overweight and obese individuals, physical activity reduced the risk of heart disease, but the risks never fell as low as those seen in persons of normal weight.
“Regardless of body weight,” Weinstein’s team concludes, “these data highlight the importance of counseling all women to participate in increasing amounts of regular physical activity and maintaining a healthy weight to reduce the risk of heart disease.”
SOURCE: Archives of Internal Medicine, April 28, 2008.
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