Weight Loss at Any Age Could Drastically Improve Heart Health

There's some good news if you want to improve the health of your heart. Scientists have found that weight loss at any age in adulthood could yield long-term heart and vascular benefits. The new findings show the benefits of losing weight and show that it's never too late to start improving your health.

In order to learn how weight loss might impact a person, the researchers looked at the lifelong patterns of weight change on cardiovascular risk factors in a group of men and women followed since birth in March 1946. Participants were classified as normal weight, overweight, or obese in childhood and at the ages of 36, 43, 53, and 60-64. In addition, cardiovascular phenotyping between the ages of 60 and 64 years of age was used to assess the effect of lifetime exposure to adiposity on cardiovascular risk factors.

So what did they find? It turns out that even transitory weight loss during adulthood can have cardiovascular benefits. That said, only 2 percent of the participants had a sustained reduction in BMI category during adulthood; this, in particular, underscores the importance of weight maintenance.

"Our study is unique because it followed individuals for such a long time, more than 60 years, and allowed us to assess the effect of modest, real-life changes in adiposity," said John Deanfield, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Our findings suggest that losing weight at any age can result in long-term cardiovascular health benefits, and support public health strategies and lifestyle modifications that help individuals who are overweight or obese to lose weight at all ages."

The findings reveal that losing weight can improve heart health, no matter what your age. Maintaining that weight loss, though, could be especially important to continuing to improve your health. Currently, the scientists hope to examine long-term patterns of intentional versus unintentional weight loss, the means to achieve weight loss, and the weight loss maintenance necessary to reduce cardiovascular endpoints.

The findings are published in the journal The Lancet: Diabetes & Endocrinology.