Get fat on health
Overweight people over the age of 80 die later than their skinny peers
Tatiana Fedina, Naked Science
Body Mass Index (BMI) indicators it is used to assess how much a person's weight corresponds to the norm for his growth. Most recommendations assume that a person with a score above 25 is overweight, and those with a score above 30 are considered obese.
Xiaoming Shi of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing and his colleagues have studied the mortality risk of more than 27,000 people over 80 years old across China since 1998. The average age of people was 93 when they started participating in the study, then they were followed until 2018 or until death (if it occurred earlier).
The team took into account several factors, including socio-economic status, education, and whether a person smoked.
Article Lv et al. The obesity paradox is mostly driven by decreased noncardiovascular disease mortality in the oldest old in China: a 20-year prospective cohort study published in the journal Nature Aging.
The BMI recommendations are based on measurements taken in younger age groups, Shi says. According to him, as the world's population ages, it is important to ensure that these recommendations make sense for older age groups as well.
Previous analyses have found a correlation between higher BMI rates in older age groups and lower mortality rates, but this is the first study in which the issue was considered with such a large sample size.
The researchers found that the optimal BMI for people over 80 is about 29. This is mainly due to a lower risk of death from non-vascular causes, such as cancer or respiratory diseases. In addition, this group had a low risk of death from cardiovascular diseases, although this relationship was weaker. Even those with a BMI in the obese range, from 30 to 35, had a lower mortality rate than those with a BMI in the range of 20 to 25.
As Shi notes, it is unclear why a higher BMI is associated with a lower mortality rate. According to him, this can be explained by the fact that such people have a more nutritious diet. He also notes that in general, BMI indicators in this population were lower than in the West. More than 40 percent of people over the age of 60 in the United States are obese. "Our results most likely cannot be extrapolated to other age and ethnic groups," he clarifies.
"This study highlights the importance of taking age into account when considering the relationship between BMI and mortality or other health risks," explains Louise Baur from the University of Sydney. She says that this study is not able to say exactly why being overweight may be associated with improved health in people over 80. The researcher agrees that this can be explained by a good diet.
"Although BMI is an affordable and inexpensive way to assess a person's health, it should not be relied upon as the only measure of health," adds Nicholas Fuller, also from the University of Sydney. — BMI is based on body weight, but a person's risk of disease is related to body fat, not weight. It is more important to focus on indicators that tell us more about fat in the body and where it is distributed — for example, around the waist — in order to better understand the state of health and risks."
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