If you are at risk for a having a heart attack then your BMI or Body Mass Index could lend a hand in estimating when it might occur. According to a statistic published in Best Life magazine (2/09), if your BMI is measured to be between 25 and 30, your heart attack is likely to occur 3.5 years earlier than if your BMI was below 25. If your BMI is measured to be above 30, then you are likely to suffer your heart attack 6.8 years earlier.
Obviously this is a fairly vague stat because we don't know if we're actually going to have a heart attack or not but it does suggest that lower BMI scores will delay a heart attack if you are knowingly or not knowingly at risk for them.
This stat also fails to note the difference between high BMI scores due to the extremely fit and those who are high due to being unfit. From my non-academic mind I would suppose that the possibility of fit people with high BMI's skews the results to be less impressive than they really are. I would expect the 'years earlier' likelihood of heart attack to be sooner rather than later if you are unfit and have a high BMI but of course I have no basis for this but of opinion and speculation.
Most importantly though if you have a heart attack hopefully you'll be able to recover from your heart attack. I would imagine the higher the BMI, the more stressful it will be. I would actually advise not having one in the first place but sometimes it even happens to the fit people of the world.
Anyway, I don't have any specific studies to back up these facts or my own opinions so I'll let this post be a sounding board for others to weigh in with their opinions. Does anybody have any additional thoughts on this subject?
Source
Best Life, Feb 2009
BMI Relationship with Risk of Heart Attack
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2 comments:
It would be great if you knew where that magazine got their info from for this stat. The details of such a study could clear things up. Many times, they will exclude certain outliers to make sure the data isn't being skewed. In this case, that would be people who are ridiculously fit so their BMI is still high but only because they have such huge muscles!
That's a good point about the study; if they pulled the buff folk or the extreamly fit people out of the study so as to not skew the results then the stats are as presented. Unfortunately we don't know if this was the case.
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