Weight Loss Helps Your Heart
A British study said that losing too much weight rejuvenates the physical structure of the heart and makes no difference if the weight is lost through surgery or dieting.
The heart muscles of those who had a body mass index (BMI) of 40 (considered a BMI of 30 as the usual marker of obesity) were noticeably thinner and more efficient when they reduced their BMI to 32.2 in single year, according to a report of the August 18 edition of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
Both the diet and bariatric surgery resulted in comparable significant reductions in abnormalities and heart failure in the structure, according to researchers at the University of Oxford.
Bariatric surgery is designed to induce weight loss by reducing the amount of food you can eat the people, the amount of food that can metabolize or both.
The weight loss of 21 kg on average (about 45 lb) achieved by the 37 obese study “is what is typically seen in bariatric surgery,” said Dr. Philip R. Schauer, director of the bariatric and metabolic institute at the Cleveland Clinic.
Schauer noted that many of these obese people lost that weight by eating less, and considered it quite unusual for someone to make diet and achieve that end. It was a very special subset.
Moreover, the problem with weight loss diet is that “the weight gain is the norm, while for bariatric surgery is ample evidence that maintaining weight loss,” said Schauer.
The Oxford researchers used cardiac MRI, a special x-ray technique for detailed information on the structure of the heart, not only of the 37 obese participants, also for 20 normal-weight volunteers, whose average BMI was 21. They found that the walls of the left and right ventricles, chambers that pump blood from the heart, were significantly thicker among obese people. They also found a reduced capacity for the heart to keep blood in diastole, the resting point of the heartbeat, among the obese.
A year later, after weight loss, heart muscles of obese people were smaller and their hearts were able to hold more blood. The thickening of the aorta, the heart’s main artery, is also substantially reduced after weight loss.
These findings provide a potential mechanism for the reduction of mortality seen in weight loss.
In addition, therefore helps to explain something about a medical mystery why people who are overweight are at marked increased risk of heart attack and sudden death than the figures show, said Dr. Christine Ren, bariatric surgeon and associate professor of surgery at the Langone Medical Center New York University.
Most say it’s quite healthy, perhaps with a slight elevation of blood pressure but when it is discussed at length, one can show abnormal heart function. The point is that your heart is not normal and that this is already having negative health effects.
Losing weight by dieting is desirable, but the problem with diets is that statistics show that the maintenance of weight loss diet is extremely difficult and quite rare.
Bariatric surgery is expensive and reaches $ 15,000, but can reach $ 25,000, is not perfect. There will always be five percent of those people who recover most of the weight, but it remains the best chance of significant weight loss.
However, health insurance coverage of bariatric surgery is uncertain and varies between insurers and insured and from state to state, he said. Many plans are beginning to put more limits to coverage.