14 DAY TRIAL // Obesity might just be the illness of this century, as more and more people suffer from it lately. A study extended over the last 60 years concluded that people that are obese in their young years, have bigger risk of dying prematurely. This study was presented today at the International Congress on Obesity in Stockholm.
In the past 60 years, researchers followed up more than 5,000 military recruits, from the age of 20 until the age of 80. More precisely, 1,930 obese and 3,601 non-obese male military conscripts were observed and body mass index was measured at ages of 25, 35 and 46. During this observation period, 1,191 men died.
The study's leader and researcher at the Institute of Preventive Medicine, Copenhagen University Hospital and the Institute of Biomedical Sciences at University of Copenhagen in Denmark, Esther Zimmermann, said that “at age 70 years, 70% of the men in the comparison group and 50% of those in the obese group were still alive and we estimated that from middle age, the obese were likely to die eight years earlier than those in the comparison group”.
Scientists noticed that death chances increased by ten percent per BMI point above normal and that obese men had eight years less to live than healthy recruits. They also said that the most long-living men seemed to be those who had a BMI of 25. Among other observations, researchers wanted to know how being obese at the age of 20 affects your entire life. They saw that obesity at 20 had long lasting effects up to 60 years later.
Basically men that were obese at the age of 20, were still obese decades later. "More than 70% of the obese young men were still obese at the follow-up examinations, whereas only 4% of the men in comparison group developed obesity during follow-up. Obesity seems to be a persistent condition and it appears that if it has not occurred in men by the age of 20, the chance of it developing later are quite low. The persistence of obesity may partly explain why obesity at 20 years of age has lifelong mortality effects, but it needs to be proven whether that is the full explanation or whether, by itself, being obese at an early age increases the risk of early death," she stated.
Zimmermann is not sure that the obese men that died, passed away because they were obese at 20 or simply because it was a condition they had all their life, but added that further studies will one day answer this question.