Pot Bellies Increase Risk of Heart Attack

Doctors continually inform their patients to lose weight. An increased risk of many conditions or illnesses such as heart disease, high blood pressure and stroke are linked to carrying around a few extra pounds. A new study suggest that is not only how much extra weight you are carrying but where that extra weight gets stored might make a difference. Men, there is a reason to get rid of that potbelly other than increasing your attractiveness to the opposite sex.

The findings published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology showed a direct link between a pot or a pear shaped bodies and an increasing build up of plaque in the arteries of younger people. While roughly one third of Americans fall into the category of morbidly obese, that is, they are roughly thirty pounds over what their ideal body weight should be for their frame and size, researchers have often wondered whether certain types of obesity are worse than others.

Heart disease is the leading killer of both men and women in the United States. According to the American Heart Association, 870,000 Americans fall victim to the disease each year. The people conducting the study looked specifically at atherosclerosis, a systemic thickening and calcification of artery blood vessel walls due to a build-up of calcium and/or plaque composed of cholesterol and triglyceride fats.

The study which ran started in the year 2000 and ended in 2002 took blood and urine samples from 2,700 men and women and all the participants agreed to undergo a noninvasive imaging tests, including MRIs to ascertain the amount of arterial calcium build up in the arteries and the heart. For both sexes, the amount of fat in the belly in relationship to the amount of fat found in the hips was the biggest determining factor.

When differences such as age, diabetes, general heart health, and cholesterol status, the shapes of the participants body was a much better factor than the body mass index and cholesterol status alone. (The Body mass index is a tool calculated to measure how much of a person’s weight is body fat.) Dr. Curtis M. Rimmerman, a cardiologist and medical director of the Westlake, Lakewood and Avalon Pointe branches of the Cleveland clinic said that doctors would do better to focus less on how much weight a patient has and more on where the weight is distributed in order to better identify patients at risk for developing heart disease.