10 Mar 2011 Obesity and Cardiovascular Risk: Does Size Matter?

A very large new study finds that obesity — no matter how it is calculated — is not an important independent predictor of cardiovascular disease. A report from the Emerging Risk Factors Collaboration published online in the Lancet analyzed individual records from more than 220,000 people without known cardiovascular disease and found that none of the traditional methods to categorize obesity — BMI, waist circumference, and waist-to-hip ratio — provided significant additional information about CV risk beyond that already provided by systolic blood pressure, diabetes, and lipids.