Want to figure out your heart health risk?
Look at your belly fat, not your body mass index, a new study says.
Excess fat stored around the waist is more strongly associated with heart failure risk than BMI, an estimate of body fat based on height and weight, researchers will report at a meeting of the American Heart Association.
“This research helps us understand why some people develop heart failure despite having a body weight that seems healthy,” lead researcher Szu-Han Chen, a medical student at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University in Taiwan, said in a news release.
“By monitoring waist size and inflammation, clinicians may be able to identify people with higher risk earlier and focus on prevention strategies that could reduce the chance of heart failure before symptoms begin,” Chen said.
For the new study, researchers tracked nearly 2,000 Black adults from an ongoing study of heart disease in Jackson, Mississippi. During follow up of nearly seven years, 112 people developed heart failure.
Results showed that measurements of excess belly fat were associated with higher heart failure risk, but high BMI was not.
Specifically, larger waist circumference increased heart failure risk by 31%, and higher waist-to-height ratio increased risk by 27%, the study says.
Researchers also found that inflammation explains a quarter to a third of the link between excess belly fat and heart failure.
“This study highlights the importance of integrating measures of central adiposity such as waist circumference into routine preventive care," said Dr. Sadiya Khan, a professor of cardiovascular epidemiology at Northwestern University in Chicago, who reviewed the findings.
"Understanding upstream drivers of heart failure risk including central adiposity is key to recognizing and modifying risk," she added in a news release.
Researchers said future study should look into how belly fat and inflammation influence heart failure, and whether reducing inflammation might help prevent the condition.
Researchers are scheduled to present their findings Thursday at an American Heart Association meeting in Boston.
Findings presented at medical meetings should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.