Overweight, obesity fuel risk of developing cardiopulmonary multimorbidity

Being fat contributes to the development of cardiopulmonary (CP) multimorbidity (MM), reports a study. As a result, adiposity may be targeted by future interventions to help prevent MM.

A team of investigators identified 408,886 individuals from the UK Biobank who had complete phenotypic and genetic data. They performed Cox regression and Mendelian randomization (MR) analyses separately for observational and causal associations.

A total of 1,492 incident CP-MM were found during a median follow-up of 8.7 years. Observational analysis revealed that individuals with obesity had a greater risk of developing CP-MM (hazard ratio, 1.51, 95 percent confidence interval, 1.30‒1.75) than those with normal body mass index (BMI).

In restricted cubic spline analyses, a U-shaped relationship was seen between continuous BMI and CP-MM (p<0.001), while a linear relationship was observed in waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) adjusted for BMI. Joint analysis showed that overweight adults maintaining an ideal WHR were less likely to develop CP-MM.

In linear MR analysis, each increase of 1 kg/m² in genetically predicted BMI and 1 percent in genetically predicted WHR_adjBMI resulted in a 9-percent and 10-percent greater risk for incident CP-MM, respectively. Nonlinear MR analyses exhibited linearity between genetically predicted BMI or WHR_adjBMI and CP-MM.

“Adiposity may play a causal role in CP-MM development and represent a promising approach for multimorbidity prevention,” the investigators said.