People with pockets of fat hidden inside their muscles are at a higher risk of dying or being hospitalized from a heart attack or heart failure, regardless of their body mass index, according to new research. This is the first study to comprehensively investigate the effects of fatty muscles on heart disease.The new finding adds evidence that existing measures, such as body mass index or waist circumference, are not adequate to evaluate the risk of heart disease accurately for all people.
The new study was led by Professor Viviany Taqueti, Director of the Cardiac Stress Laboratory at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Faculty at Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA. She said: “Obesity is now one of the biggest global threats to cardiovascular health, yet body mass index — our main metric for defining obesity and thresholds for intervention — remains a controversial and flawed marker of cardiovascular prognosis. This is especially true in women, where high body mass index may reflect more ‘benign’ types of fat.