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By Genevra Pittman
NEW YORK | Tue Oct 25, 2011 4:16pm EDT
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Teens who are overweight or obese have higher chances of dying from heart disease down the line, but that extra risk virtually vanishes if they shed the spare pounds as adults.
That's according to a new study that tracked almost 19,000 men starting at age 18 -- when all of them were Harvard University undergrads -- for more than half a century on average.
"We have lots of data showing that if you are obese in middle age, it increases your risk of dying," said I-Min Lee from Harvard Medical School in Boston, who worked on the study.
"What we have less data on is, what if you're heavy when you're younger? How does that impact your health later on?"
The findings, Lee said, show that it's important to keep extra weight off in the first place -- but if young adults are overweight, they can lower their future heart risks by slimming down.
The data came from Harvard students who had a routine medical exam, which included measurements of height and weight, when they started college between 1916 and 1950.
In the 1960's, researchers followed up with 18,995 of the men and again asked about their height and weight, as well as other lifestyle habits and medical issues that could affect their risk of heart disease. At the time of those second surveys, the men were 46 years old on average.
For the current study, a new group of researchers collected participants' death certificates and determined that over 56 years from their first medical exams, about 11 percent of the men died from heart disease.
It turned out that being heavy at both the early and mid-life health checks increased the risk of ultimately dying from heart disease.
Obese young men had almost double the risk of their slimmer peers for heart disease death. Compared to normal-weight Harvard alumni, middle-aged men were 25 percent more likely to die of heart disease if they were overweight and 60 percent more likely if they were obese.
Those links held up when Lee and her colleagues took into account men's other heart disease risks, including high blood pressure, smoking and lack of physical activity.
However, the extra heart risk that came with being overweight and obese early in life disappeared in men who were no longer heavy at their follow-up health assessment, the researchers reported this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
Often, "obese young adults become obese middle-aged adults," Lee told Reuters Health.
"However, if you're able to lose that weight, once you get to normal weight in middle age... the excess risk you had as a youngster goes away."
Even people who are heavy in their 50s and 60s can ease their future heart risks by losing weight, Lee added.
Stephen Kritchevsky, who has studied weight loss in older adults at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, agreed.
"The number of years being fat isn't as important as being overweight at middle age," he told Reuters Health. "At least through middle age, regardless of your life history, it is likely to be helpful to your health to try to lose weight."
Lee's team noted that the findings might not apply to women, since they weren't included in the study. Another limitation is that the study didn't distinguish where on their bodies different men carried their fat, which may affect the risk of heart disease.
Still, Kritchevsky, who wasn't involved in the new study, said the findings are "good news" for both the young and old.
"For younger overweight people, it suggests that if you address that, it will pay off," he concluded. For that group, "it's not too early to address it, and for middle-aged people, it's not too late."
SOURCE: bit.ly/tmd85w Archives of Internal Medicine, online October 24, 2011.
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