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Are more likely to have a “beer belly” Heart loss due to thick in any other location on bodyespecially in men,
According to a study it has been found abdominal obesityor belly fat, is associated with more harmful changes in the heart composition compared to composite body weight alone.
The findings, presented this week at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), suggest that belly fat may cause the heart to pump less blood, leading to heart failure.
Study author Jennifer Earley, a radiology resident at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany, said: “It appears to cause a potentially pathological form of cardiac remodeling, concentric hypertrophy, where the heart muscle thickens but the overall size of the heart does not increase, leading to a smaller heart volume.
“In effect, the internal chambers become smaller, so the heart holds and pumps less blood. This pattern impairs the heart’s ability to relax properly, which can eventually lead to heart failure.”
The researchers used data from an ongoing long-term population study in Germany and studied cardiac MRI images of 2,244 adults aged 46 to 78 who had no known cardiovascular disease.
They took into account participants’ BMI, a measure of general obesity calculated from a person’s weight and height, and waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), a measure of waist circumference, to calculate abdominal obesity.
According to BMI, 69 percent of the men and 56 percent of the women in the study were overweight or obese. Using WHR, 91 percent of men and 64 percent of women met the World Health Organization (WHO) criteria for obesity.
They found that BMI is often associated with enlarged heart chambers and that abdominal obesity is associated with thickening of the heart muscle and smaller heart chamber size.
However, the study authors found that changes in heart structure were more prominent in men, even after taking into account risk factors including arterial hypertension, smoking, diabetes and cholesterol.
It is believed that excess weight, especially around the waist, causes fatty deposits to accumulate in the arteries and major organs, increasing the risk of high blood pressure, high cholesterol and type 2 diabetes.
If the arteries that supply blood to your heart become damaged and blocked, it can lead to a heart attack. If this occurs in the arteries that carry blood to your brain, it can cause stroke or vascular dementia, explains the British Heart Foundation.
But men are more likely to accumulate belly fat than women, putting them at greater risk.
Navid Sattar, Professor of Metabolic Medicine at the University of Glasgow, said Independent: “Men accumulate belly fat faster than women, which means men have a higher risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and heart failure than women.
“Women have a better ability to store fat in the skin, arms, legs and the fat gets stored there. Whereas when you start storing fat in the belly you are also putting fat in organs where it shouldn’t be, like the liver, muscle, pancreas and heart. So men’s buffering capacity for weight is not as good as women’s.”
Dr. Earle concluded that rather than focusing on overall weight loss, middle-aged adults should focus on preventing fat accumulation in the abdominal area through regular exercise, a balanced diet, and medical intervention if necessary.