blood pressure medications will not be enough to prevent heart disease
among the ever-growing number of Baby Boomers who are overweight or obese,
a new study suggests.
The simple truth, experts say, is that pounds must also be shed to keep
cardiovascular trouble away.
"There is a debate out there about whether this generation is going to
live as long as their parents, and the truth is they probably won't," said
study author Dr. Gregory L. Burke, director of the division of public
health sciences at Wake Forest University School of medicine in
Winston-Salem, NC.
"My ultimate worry is that we've seen a 50-year decline in
cardiovascular disease mortality, but if you begin to look at recent
trends, it's beginning to plateau," he added. "And my fear is that because
of the increase in obesity we're going to begin to see a reversal of that
trend where heart disease rates begin to go up."
The research involving 6,814 men and women aged 45 to 84 revealed an
even greater prevalence of overweight and obesity than shown in similar
studies done five years earlier. Depending on the demographic group,
between 60 percent and 85 percent of the participants were overweight and
between 30 percent and 50 percent were obese, the federally funded study
found. The obesity epidemic is more likely environmentally than
genetically driven, Burke said. The differences between the weights of
white, black and Hispanic Americans are no longer as meaningful, he
stressed. Only Chinese-Americans have significantly less obesity (5
percent) than other ethnic groups.
A decade ago, experts thought the heart-related risks of obesity could
be counterbalanced by the treatment of risk factors such as high
cholesterol and glucose intolerance, Burke explained. People thought that,
"Gosh, all we need to do is treat those risk factors and we can ameliorate
the effects of obesity. So, our study looked at whether that is indeed
true," he added.
It isn't, said Burke, noting that this is where his study breaks new
ground. There is a relationship between less obvious, subclinical
cardiovascular disease markers, such as the thickening of the walls of the
carotid artery, and obesity, he explained. Even though the overweight and
obese people studied hadn't had heart attacks they did show various
markers that are predictors of future cardiovascular events, Burke added.
This is was true despite the high number of people who were taking
medications for the well-known triad of risk factors of high cholesterol,
diabetes and high blood pressure.
Lona Sandon, a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association, said
that the findings show that "many of the people who were obese were being
treated with various medications, but they still were not improving to the
point where they were decreasing their risk."
The American mentality is that "if I just take those pills, I'll be
OK," said Sandon, an assistant professor of clinical nutrition at the
University of Texas Southwestern Medical School. The study "kind of says
you have to make some changes, some lifestyle changes and some food
changes, to lead to a healthier weight."
Sandon added that even greater emphasis needs to be placed on
prevention. "It's easier to prevent with an hour of exercise a day than
correct with three hours of exercise a day," she noted. "Hopefully [the
study] can be some kind of a wake-up call to tell us we need to do
something more than hand out a prescription."
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