The longer the obesity, the higher the glycosylated hemoglobin level

Attention! The longer you are obese, the higher the glycosylated hemoglobin level!

Core Tip: Remember, "healthy fat people" don't exist, weight loss and exercise are the ultimate way out for fat people!

Obesity is currently a global public health problem. According to data from the World Health Organization (WHO), the global prevalence of obesity in children and adolescents rose from 0.9% and 0.7% in boys and girls in 1975 to 7.8% and 5.6% in 2016, respectively. At the same time, the increase in childhood obesity will significantly increase the incidence of adult obesity (BMI> 30kg/m2), and the incidence of the latter (male and female) has also increased from 3% and 6.6% in 1975 to 11.6% and 15.7 in 2016, respectively. %.

There is no doubt that obesity is associated with many adverse health outcomes, especially the morbidity and mortality associated with cardiovascular disease (CVD). But in terms of cardiometabolic risk, obese individuals do not represent a homogeneous group. Because there is a group of people who exceed the above-mentioned obesity BMI threshold, but they are considered metabolically healthy because they have no other major cardiovascular risk factors.

On the other hand, the heterogeneity of cardiometabolic risk is also related to the length of time a person is obese. Studies have shown that young people’s lifetime risk of being overweight or obese is higher than in the past, so it is important to fully understand the impact of obesity duration on the development of cardiometabolic risk factors.

To this end, a team of experts from the Institute of Exercise and Health at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom conducted a comprehensive study on the relationship between the duration of obesity during adolescence (10-40 years) and increased cardiometabolic risk. The results were published in the latest American Science Public In the library journal PLOS Medicine.

The researchers used 3 national birth cohort data from the United Kingdom, namely the 1946 British Health and Development Survey (NSHD), the 1958 British Child Development Study (NCDS) and the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70). A total of 20746 participants were included, of which 49.1% were men.

The researchers calculated the BMI index of the participants, especially the BMI data and cardiometabolic disease risk factors data between the ages of 10 and 40, and derived the age of onset of obesity, the duration of obesity, and the severity of cumulative obesity. The results show that, in general, the duration of obesity is related to the increased risk of many cardiometabolic diseases after middle age: systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP), high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) and glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c) ).

The longer the obesity lasts, the greater the risk of all cardiometabolic diseases. Among them, the strongest correlation with obesity duration is HbA1c: Compared with people who have never been obese, those who have been obese for less than 5 years have relatively higher HbA1c levels by 5%, while those who have been obese for 20-30 years have a relatively higher HbA1c level. The HbA1c level is 20% higher.

When the severity of obesity is adjusted, the correlation between SBP, DBP and HDL-c and obesity duration is greatly reduced. However, for HbA1c, the correlation with the duration of obesity persists and is not related to the severity of obesity.