Central obesity in normal-weight people places them at greater risk of death than does overall overweight or obesity in people without the excess abdominal fat, a new study suggests. The startling findings were published online November 9, 2015, in Annals of Internal Medicine by Karine R Sahakyan, MD, PhD, of the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, and colleagues.
Their analysis of an average 14 years' follow-up data from more than 15,000 participants in the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (1988–1994) reveals that people who had normal body mass indexes (BMIs 18.5–24.9 kg/m2) but who had central obesity (defined using World Health Organization criteria of waist/hip ratio 0.85 or greater in women and 0.90 or above in men) had worse long-term survival compared with participants with normal fat distribution, regardless of their BMI. "I was anticipating that…
