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by Agata Blaszczak-Boxe
People who have been overweight
or obese at any time during
their lives may be more likely
to die early, even if they lose
weight later, a new study suggests.
Among the people in the
study, those who had ever been
overweight were 19 percent
more likely to die during the
23-year study period, compared
with those who had never exceeded
normal weight.
Those who had ever been
obese (with a body mass index,
or BMI, from 30.0 to 34.9) were
65 percent more likely to die during
the study than those who had
never exceeded normal weight.
And those who had ever been severely
obese (with a BMI of 35.0
or above) were nearly 150 percent
more likely to die during this time
Even After Weight Loss, Obesity Can Reduce Life Span
period than those who remained
in the normal weight range.
The new study “sheds light
on the need for greater efforts to
stem the obesity epidemic,” said
study author Andrew Stokes, of
the Boston University School of
Public Health
In the study, the researchers
looked at the BMIs of more
than 6,000 Americans who were
between 50
and 74 years
old when the
study began, in
1988. In addition
to looking
at the participants’
current
BMIs, at the
time of the start
of the study,
the researchers
looked at the
history of the individuals’ lifetime
BMIs. This approach differs
from that of previous studies that
have looked at the relationship
between a person’s BMI and their
risk of early death, the researchers
said. Those previous studies
tended to consider people’s BMIs
at only a single point in time, the
researchers said.
“Imagine if you compared
Strong Social Connections Linked to Better Health
by Agata Blaszczak-Boxe
Eating healthy food and exercising
play important roles in
health and well-being, but if you
are feeling lonely, you may also
want to consider reaching out:
A lack of social connection may
have a negative impact on your
physical health, new research
suggests.
For example, older people
ages 57 to 91 who felt socially
isolated had more than double
the risk of high blood pressure as
those who didn’t feel isolated, the
researchers found. They noted
that this increase in risk (of 142
percent) was greater than the increase
in the risk of high blood
pressure that comes with having
diabetes, which was a 49 percent
increase in this age group.
Moreover, adolescents and
teens ages 12 to 18 who felt socially
isolated had a 27 percent
increased risk of inflammation,
compared with those who did
not feel socially isolated, the researchers
found. This difference
is comparable to the 21 percent
increase in the risk of inflammation
that comes with physical
inactivity among teens, the
researchers said.
“It is as important to encourage
individuals to build broad
and good social relationships
and increase social skills, interacting
with others” as it is to
N01/830 от 01.08.2016 e-mail: info@gorizont.com Simply the best
encourage them to eat a healthy
diet and be physically active, said
study author Yang Claire Yang,
a professor of sociology at the
University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill.
Indeed, the people in the
study who felt socially connected
to family or friends seemed
to have lower health risks. For
example, teens in the study who
said they felt integrated into their
social circles were 48 percent less
likely to be obese than those who
were not socially integrated, the
researchers found. And older
adults who were socially integrated
were 54 percent less likely
to develop high blood pressure
than those who were not socially
integrated.
“It seems that being socially
connected, having a decent-size
social network and also gaining
support from the network– the
quality as well as the quantity of
the relationships– matter a great
deal,” Yang said.
In the study, the researchers
looked at data from four large
previous studies of people in
the United States. Each study
included between 863 and 7,889
people, whose ages ranged from
12 to 91. The researchers examined
the association between the
people’s relationships with others
and their blood pressure, body
mass index, waist circumference
Do Pot Smokers Drink More or Less? Results Are Mixed
nonsmokers to smokers,” Stokes
said. “If there are former smokers
in the nonsmoking group, it
is going to skew the comparison.”
One such study, published in
January 2013, suggested that being
overweight could actually increase
a person’s life span, Stokes said.
Moreover, that study found that
being mildly obese was actually
associated with no increased risk
of death, he said. “You had to be
morbidly obese to experience any
elevated risks for death,” according
to those findings, Stokes said.
But the new study found that,
“quite to the contrary, risks increase
at every level of body mass
index above the normal weight
category,” he told Live Science.
The new results suggest that
the problem of obesity needs to
be taken very seriously, Stokes
said. “We see that obesity is affecting
many people in a population,”
he said. “It is not just restricted
to certain individuals or
groups.” This is why the solutions
to the high rates of obesity really
need to target not only individuals,
but also the population as a
whole, he added.
Dr. Mitchell Roslin, chief of
obesity surgery at Lenox Hill
Hospital in New York City, who
was not involved in the new
study, stressed the importance of
physical fitness for the reducing
the health risks that can come
with obesity.
“Bottom line is that not all
heavy people will die young,”
Roslin told Live Science in an
email. “But those who are not fit
[or who] have metabolic conditions
such as diabetes or severe
sleep apnea have a disproportionately
high risk.”
and levels of C-reactive protein,
a marker of inflammation.
The findings suggest that it is
specifically social connections,
or the lack of them, that drive
certain health effects, and not
the other way around, the researchers
said. “We have reason
to believe that the relationship is
strongly likely to be causal– from
social [factors] to illness as opposed
to the other way around,”
Yang told Live Science.
People should try to evaluate
the state of their social connections
on a regular basis, the
researchers suggested. For example,
they can ask themselves
if they feel close to family members
such as their parents, and if
they feel that they are satisfied
with the quality of their relationships
with their family.
If there are any aspects of
their relationships that they feel
should be improved, they should
work on them, Yang said.
by Laura Geggel
Do people who use legal marijuana
drink less or more alcohol?
The answer, it turns out, is
complicated, a new study finds.
It seems logical that people
who are already high on marijuana
would have less of a desire
to drink alcohol than people
who weren’t high, and so the
pot smokers should drink less
(which researchers sometimes
refer to as “replacement,” meaning
one drug is replaced with another.)
However, it’s also possible
that people who use one substance
are more likely to use another,
and so pot smokers might
drink more. Researchers have
been trying to find out which is
true.
“The evidence is definitely
mixed,” said the lead author of
the new study, Katar?na Guttmannov?,
a research scientist
in the Social Development Research
Group at the University
of Washington in Seattle. “In
the context of marijuana policy
changes,” pot sometimes replaces
alcohol use, but in other cases
pot increases drinking, she said.
The question about the relationship
between the two substances
is important, she said.
As more states make medical
and recreational marijuana legal,
researchers are wondering what
kinds of societal effects the new
laws will have. On one hand,
fewer people will be jailed for
using cannabis, and costs to the
criminal justice system will likely
drop, Guttmannov? said.
“On the other hand, legalization
could also bring some big
costs if it turns out that it leads
to increases in marijuana and/
or other substance use,” Guttmannov?
told Live Science in an
email.
To investigate how the increasingly
popular drug affects
people’s alcohol use, Guttmannov?
and her colleagues looked
at 15 peer-reviewed studies that
addressed the decriminalization
of marijuana, or the legalization
of either medical marijuana or
recreational marijuana, and the
impact of these actions on alcohol
use.
Alcohol is the most widely
used drug in the United States,
the researchers said. “We chose
to focus on alcohol because even
relatively small changes in alcohol
consumption could have
profound implications for public
health, safety and related costs,”
Guttmannov? said in a statement.
In the study, the researchers
tried to determine whether legalized
marijuana was becoming
a substitute for alcohol– that
is, whether people were drinking
less alcohol and using pot
instead. If this is the case, marijuana’s
legalization would likely
lower the costs to society that
are related to excessive drinking,
because of reduced health
care costs, fewer traffic accidents
and improved workplace
productivity, the researchers
said.
However, it is also possible
that legalizing weed (marijuana
is recreationally legal in four
states and the District of Co-