Waist circumference height ratio reflecting abdominal obesity, predicting heart failure risk more accurately than BMI
May 19, 2025
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This is the result of a study presented by Dr. Amra Yuzic of Lund University of Sweden at the European Heart Failure 2025 (ESC) conference in Belgrade, Serbia on the 19th (local time). The research team said it confirmed this association in a study that followed 1,800 elderly people in Malmö for more than 12 years.
It is known that the higher the BMI, the higher the risk of heart failure, but it is pointed out that BMI, which is most widely used to measure obesity, can be affected by gender or race and has the disadvantage of not reflecting body fat distribution. Even if the BMI is normal, a high WtHR may increase the risk of chronic diseases. The research team explained that patients with high BMI sometimes have better prognosis of heart failure, but there is no such phenomenon in the waist circumference-height ratio.
1,792 people aged 45 to 73 (average age of 67 years) who participated in the Malmo Prevention Project were divided into four groups according to the waist circumference-height ratio, and heart failure in each group was followed for an average of 12.6 years, with one-third of normal blood sugar, fasting blood sugar disorder, and diabetes patients each consisting of a third, and the median waist circumference-height ratio of all participants was 0.57. During the follow-up period, 132 people were diagnosed with heart failure.
As a result of the analysis, the higher the waist circumference-height ratio, the greater the risk of heart failure. This was maintained even after other risk factors were considered, and it was analyzed that the risk of heart failure increased by 34% whenever the waist circumference-height ratio increased by 1 standard deviation (0.04~0.05). In particular, the group with the top 25% waist circumference-height ratio (WtHR median of 0.65) had a 2.71 times higher risk of heart failure than the other three groups.
The research team noted that the median waist circumference-height ratio of participants significantly exceeded the cardiovascular metabolic risk increase baseline of 0.5, saying it is ideal to keep the waist circumference less than half the height for health.
If the WtHR is less than 0.5, it is classified as a relatively healthy range, if it is 0.5 to 0.59, it is classified as a high-risk group for disease. When the WtHR is above 0.5, the risk of metabolic diseases such as metabolic syndrome, hypertension, hyperglycemia, and hypertriglyceridemia is reported to increase 1.3 to 1.7 times.
Meanwhile, a study at Oxford University in England, which followed 430,000 people for an average of 13 years, also showed that WtHR was better at predicting the risk of cardiovascular diseases such as myocardial infarction and stroke than body fat percentage or BMI.
This article was translated by Naver AI translator.
