Abdominal fat distribution predicts heart disease
December 2007Abdominal obesity is a strong independent risk factor for heart disease, and using the waist-hip ratio rather than waist alone is a better predictor of heart disease risk among men and women, according to new research in the School of Medicine.
Dr Dexter Canoy, of the Health Methodology research group, also looked at whether the association between fat distribution and heart disease risk was independent of body mass index (BMI), which assesses body weight relative to height, as well as other heart disease risk factors, such as high blood pressure and high cholesterol.
Reporting his findings in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association, Dr Canoy said: “The size of the hips seems to predict a protective effect. In other words, a big waist with comparably big hips does not appear to be as worrisome as a big waist with small hips.”
The research was based on 24,508 men and women ages 45 to 79 in the UK. Researchers measured participants’ weight, height, waist circumference, hip circumference and other heart disease risk factors from 1993 to 1997. During a nine-year follow-up, 1,708 men and 892 women developed coronary heart disease. When they divided the men and women into five groups, according to waist-hip ratio, the researchers found that those with the highest waist-to-hip ratios had the highest heart disease risk.
Among the findings:
- Men in the top one-fifth of the distribution (those with the biggest waists in relation to their hips) had a 55 percent higher risk of developing coronary heart disease compared to men in the bottom one-fifth of the distribution.
- Women in the top one-fifth, or the highest waist-to-hip ratio group, were 91 percent more likely to develop heart disease than women with the smallest waists in relation to their hips.
