Effect of body mass index trajectory on lifetime risk of cardiovascular disease in a Chinese population: A cohort study

Background and aims: The longitudinal trajectories of body mass index (BMI) can reflect the pattern of BMI changes. Lifetime risk quantifies the cumulative risk of developing a disease over the remaining life of a person. We aimed to identify the trajectory of BMI and explore its association with cardiovascular disease (CVD) in the Chinese population.Methods and results: A total of 68,603 participants with a mean age of 55.46 years were included from the Kailuan cohort in Tangshan, China, who were free of CVD and cancer and with repeated measurements of BMI from 2006 to 2010. A latent mixture model was used to identify BMI tra-jectories. An improved Kaplan-Meier estimator was used to predict the lifetime risk of CVD ac-cording to BMI trajectories. During a median follow-up of 7.0 years, 3325 participants developed CVD. Five BMI trajectories were identified at three index ages (35, 45, and 55) respectively. For index age 35 years, compared with the stable low-normal weight group (22.7% [95% CI, 20.0%-25.4%]), the stable high-normal weight (27.6% [25.6%-29.5%]), stable overweight (29.4% [27.4%-31.4%]), stable-low obesity (32.8% [30.0%-35.5%]), and stable-high obesity (38.9% [33.3%-44.5%]) groups had a higher lifetime risk of CVD (P < 0.05). We observed similar patterns for stroke and myocardial infarction. Similarly, the lifetime risk of CVD was higher in the long-term overweight and obese groups at 45 and 55 index ages.Conclusions: Long-term overweight and obesity were associated with an increased lifetime risk of CVD. Our findings could assist in predicting the population burden of CVD.(c) 2022 The Italian Diabetes Society, the Italian Society for the Study of Atherosclerosis, the Ital-ian Society of Human Nutrition and the Department of Clinical Medicine and Surgery, Federico II University. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

This study aimed to identify the trajectory of body mass index (BMI) and explore its association with cardiovascular disease (CVD) in the Chinese population. Long-term overweight and obesity were found to be associated with an increased lifetime risk of CVD. These findings are important for predicting the population burden of CVD.