This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
Study: Obesity kills more Americans than previously thought
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Obesity accounted for 18% of all deaths in the American population aged 40 to 85 years from 1986 to 2006, according to a recent study published in the American Journal of Public Health. Researchers said these numbers signal a greater mortality risk among obese US adults than previously thought.
“Obesity has dramatically worse health consequences than some recent reports have led us to believe,” Ryan K. Masters, PhD, who conducted the research as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, said in a press release. “We expect that obesity will be responsible for an increasing share of deaths in the United States and perhaps even lead to declines in US life expectancy.”
They utilized 19 waves of the National Health Interview Survey linked to individual mortality rates at the National Death Index from 1986 to 2006.
Ryan K. Masters
They found that mortality among 5% of black (95% CI, –6.8 to 18.3) and 15.6% (95% CI, 8.6-22.9) of white men and 26.8% of black (95% CI, 7.3-47.4) and 21.7% of white women (95% CI, 14.4-29.3) between 1986 and 2006 were related to being overweight or obese, according to data.
“When aggregated and standardized by the race/ethnic and sex distribution of US deaths in year 2000, these results suggest that overweight and obesity were responsible for about 18.2% of US black and white men’s and women’s adult deaths between 1986 and 2006,” the researchers wrote.
When the researchers compared their findings to the existing literature, they found a significantly greater risk for mortality among men and women with obesity at older ages. Mortality increased with age across all birth cohorts, they added.
“A 5-year-old growing up today is living in an environment where obesity is much more the norm than was the case for a 5-year-old a generation or two ago. Drink sizes are bigger, clothes are bigger, and greater numbers of a child’s peers are obese,” Bruce G. Link, PhD, professor of epidemiology and sociomedical sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, said in a press release. “And once someone is obese, it is very difficult to undo. So it stands to reason that we won’t see the worst of the epidemic until the current generation of children grows old.”
Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.
Collapse
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts