A new study shows that a bad case of cardiovascular health disease caused by obesity is more likely to happen to people as young as 17 years old. Prior to this study, there has been a limited investigation of the effects of having a high body mass index (BMI) in young people.
According to their study published in Alpha Galileo, the European Society of Human Genetics investigated a potential link between increased BMI and cardiovascular health. In the annual conference that they have presented this paper yesterday, the researchers hypothesized that cardiovascular risks due to obesity were likely to register in an earlier life.
Dr. Kaitlin Wade, a Research Associate at the Medical Research Council Integrative Epidemiology Unit at the University of Bristol in the UK, used data from the Avalon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) in studying the link between obesity and cardiovascular diseases. She said that the data is a world-leading birth cohort study started in the early 1990s with the inclusion of more than 14,000 pregnant mothers and their partners and children.
Moreover, she said that the ALSPAC data gives an excellent opportunity in studying environmental and genetic factors to a person's health and development like how obesity in young people is linked to worse cardiovascular diseases.
In an article published by Science DailyThe study shows that higher BMI did not appear to have an effect on heart rate in young people. However, the results show efforts in tackling the obesity epidemic from an early age to prevent the development of a cardiovascular disease.
"Our results showed that the causal impact of higher BMI on cardiac output was solely driven by the volume of blood pumped by the left ventricle and this can explain the causal effect of higher BMI on cardiac hypertrophy and higher blood pressure that we observed in all our analyses," Dr. Wade said.
The researchers of the obesity study are now trying to see the relationship between higher BMI and disease mechanisms in young people. They are now hoping to further explore these associations with older people too.
