Patients with metabolic healthy obesity do not have an increased rate of mortality

54,089 men and women with obesity alone or clustered with a metabolic factor, or elevated glucose, blood pressure or lipids alone or clustered with obesity or another metabolic factor, were observed by researchers at York University’s Faculty of Health who compared how many of them died with how many within the normal weight population with no metabolic risk factors died. They found that patients with metabolic healthy obesity, but no other metabolic risk factors, did not have an increased rate of mortality. The study showed that unlike dyslipidemia, hypertension or diabetes alone, which are related with a high mortality risk, this isn’t the case for obesity alone.
Jennifer Kuk, research lead and associate professor at the School of Kinesiology and Health Science, York University, said: “This is in contrast with most of the literature and we think this is because most studies have defined metabolic healthy obesity as having up to one metabolic risk factor. This is clearly problematic, as hypertension alone increases your mortality risk and past literature would have called these patients with obesity and hypertension, ‘healthy’. This is likely why most studies have reported that ‘healthy’ obesity is still related with higher mortality risk. We’re showing that individuals with metabolically healthy obesity are actually not at an elevated mortality rate. We found that a person of normal weight with no other metabolic risk factors is just as likely to die as the person with obesity and no other risk factors. This means that hundreds of thousands of people in North America alone with metabolically healthy obesity will be told to lose weight when it’s questionable how much benefit they’ll actually receive.”