Being overweight could change your heart structure even as a young adult

Being overweight may cause higher blood pressure and changes to the heart’s structure, even in young adults. Efforts to achieve or maintain a normal weight from a young age may help to prevent the development of heart disease later in life. 

The innovative study design used a new genetic analysis to assess if weight directly causes higher blood pressure and changes in heart’s structure.

“Our results support efforts to reduce body mass index to within a normal, healthy range from a young age to prevent later heart disease,” 

• caused higher systolic (top number) and diastolic (bottom number) blood pressure; and
• caused enlargement of the left ventricle, the heart’s main pumping chamber.

Thickening of vessel walls is widely considered to be the first sign of atherosclerosis, a disease in which fatty plaques build up within the arteries and lead to heart disease. However, our findings suggest that higher BMIs cause changes in the heart structure of the young that may precede changes in blood vessels

“At a population level, this provides a natural experiment analogous to a randomized trial where we can compare differences in an outcome (such as heart structure and function) with differences in BMI, without the relationship being skewed by other lifestyle and behavioral factors,”