Researchers from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute have found that not only obesity but its duration also ups the risk of coronary heart diseases. For every year of obesity the person increases the risk by 2-4 per cent
Obesity is a growing problem in the United States. According to the American Heart Association, more than 13 million children and young adults between ages 2 and 19 are obese with another 23 million being overweight. 34.6 percent of adult Americans are also obese.
A new study conducted by researchers from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute found that not just the weight, but the duration of staying obese has a drastic effect on a person's health. Longer obesity durations are linked to an increased risk of developing coronary heart diseases. Every year a young adult remains obese, it increases his risk of developing silent, or subclinical, heart disease in middle age by 2 to 4 percent. This increase is independent of body mass index (BMI) or waist circumference.
For the National Institutes of Health-supported research, authors studied 3,275 Caucasian and African-American adults, aged 18-30 years. These participants had enrolled in NIH's National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute- (NHLBI) supported Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults Study (CARDIA) in the mid-1980s, around the start of the obesity epidemic in the United States.
All individuals were followed for 25 years. Every 3 to 5 years they were scanned to see whether they had become obese, and if they were, for how long they had been in that state. They also underwent CT at 15, 20, or 25 years intervals to determine the presence of coronary artery calcification.
According to a Centers of Disease Control and Prevention report, the rate of obesity has doubled among children and tripled among adolescents in the last 30 years. In the age group 6-11 years, obesity among American children increased from 7 percent in 1980 to 18 percent in 2010. Similarly, the percentage of adolescents aged 12-19 years who were obese increased from 5% to 18% over the same period.
