High BMI may not be linked to early death, study finds
Having a high body mass index, independent of other factors, may not contribute to an earlier death, a study published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE said.
Lead author Aayush Visaria, an internal medicine resident physician at the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey, alongside his co-author, professor Soko Setoguchi of the medical school and Rutgers School of Public Health, included data from more than 554,000 Americans in the study.
CNN reported that Visaria and Setoguchi analyzed information from nonpregnant individuals gathered from the 1999-2018 National Health Interview Survey and the 2019 U.S. National Death Index.
NBC News said, “The results showed no significant increase in the risk of death for those 65 years and older with BMIs between 22.5 and 34.9. The same was true for younger adults with BMIs between 22.5 and 27.4.”
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“The risk of death did rise by 18% to 108% for most people with BMI levels higher than 27.5, Visaria said, with risk rising as weight increased in a U-shaped curve,” per CNN.
What is body mass index?
Measured by dividing how much you weigh by your height, body mass index is meant to calculate how much body fat a person has, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Health care professionals have criticized this method of measuring body fat, “saying BMI does not account for crucial factors such as body fat percentage and variations in disease risk among people of different races and genders,” according to NBC News.
The CDC defines a healthy BMI range for adults to be between 18.5 to 25.
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Expert opinions
Visaria told CNN, “The real message of this study is that overweight as defined by BMI is a poor indicator of mortality risk, and that BMI in general is a poor indicator of health risk and should be supplemented with information” like waist circumference and other measures of fat.
Some pushed back on that criticism.
George Savva, a statistician at Quadram Institute Bioscience, said in a statement, “The press release downplays the increase in mortality seen in other groups that would be considered overweight or obese (those with a BMI over 27.5), and a cursory reading might give the impression that weight is not relevant to mortality risk.”
Professor of metabolic medicine at the University of Glasgow Naveed Sattar said having more body fat increases “risks of developing multiple conditions such as diabetes, arthritis, fatty liver, hypertension, heart failure, kidney disease, gout, multiple cancers, heart disease and the list goes on and on,” which will impact the quality of life and happiness for a person.
