Healthy overweight and obesity in the young: Prevalence and risk of major adverse cardiovascular events

Aims: To investigate the prevalence of metabolically healthy overweight/obesity and to study its longitudinal association with major adverse cardiovascular and renal events (MARCE). Methods and results: The study was conducted in 1210 young-to-middle-age subjects grouped according to their BMI and metabolic status. The risk of MARCE was evaluated during 17.4 years of follow-up. Forty-eight-percent of the participants had normal weight, 41.9% had overweight, and 9.3% had obesity. Metabolically healthy status was found in 31.1% of subjects with normal weight and in 20.0% of those with overweight/obesity. During the follow-up, there were 108 MARCE. In multivariate Cox analysis adjusted for confounders and risk factors, no association was found between MARCE and overweight/obesity (p = 0.49). In contrast, metabolic status considered as a two-class variable (0 versus at least one metabolic abnormality) was a significant predictor of MARCE (HR, 2.11; 95%CI, 1.21-3.70, p = 0.009). Exclusion of atrial fibrillation from MARCE (N = 87) provided similar results (HR, 2.11; 95%CI, 1.07-4.16, p = 0.030). Inclusion of average 24 h BP in the regression model attenuated the strength of the associations. Compared to the group with healthy metabolic status, the metabolically unhealthy overweight/obesity participants had an increased risk of MARCE with an adjusted HR of 2.33 (95%CI, 1.05-5.19, p = 0.038). Among the metabolically healthy individuals, the CV risk did not differ according to BMI group (p = 0.53). Conclusion: The present data show that the risk of MARCE is not increased in young metabolically healthy overweight/obesity suggesting that the clinical approach to people with high BMI should focus on parameters of metabolic health rather than on BMI. (c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of The Italian Diabetes Society, the Italian Society for the Study of Atherosclerosis, the Italian Society of Human Nutrition and the Department of Clinical Medicine and Surgery, Federico II University. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).