New research led by the University of Bristol says that being overweight may cause more hospitalizations and more diseases and deaths than previous studies say. The study, which was published in Economics and Human Biology, used a genetic method to look at the effect of body composition on more than 300,000 people who went to the hospital. Data on 550,000 UK inpatient hospital admissions was also linked to this data. The people in the study were followed up on for an average of 6 years.
The method looks at genetic changes in the genome that are linked to body composition to figure out how being overweight affects a health outcome and remove the effects of other factors that might also have an effect on body composition and rates of hospital admission together.
Having a higher BMI and WHR (waist-hip ratio) caused more people to go to the hospital each year, and the estimates were bigger than those from other studies.
People were between 16% and 26% more likely to go to the hospital with each 0.09-unit higher waist-hip ratio, compared to 8% to 16% more likely with each 4.74kg/m2 higher BMI. These changes would be like adding 9.3 cm to your waist circumference if you were a woman of average height and weight, and had average measurements of your waist and hip. If you were a man of average height and weight in this study and had average measurements of your waist and hips, this would mean that your waist circumference of 9.2 cm and an increased weight of 15kg.
Finding causal effect estimates between fatty tissue and hospital admissions that are larger than those previously reported in existing studies emphasizes the need to look into policies that can help people lose weight.
Waist to Hip Ratio may be a better way to measure body fat because it may be better at predicting hospital admissions than BMI.
