Obesity is paradoxically associated with enhanced survival in patients with established cardiovascular disease. We explored this paradox further by examining the influence of obesity on survival in patients with verified atherosclerotic heart disease.
This retrospective registry based cohort study included all patients from the Western Denmark Heart Registry with coronary atherosclerosis confirmed by coronary angiography from January 2000 to December 2010. Patients were divided into eight groups according to body mass index (BMI) based on WHO BMI classification.
Department of Cardiology, Copenhagen University Hospital Gentofte, Hellerup, Denmark.
The study included 37 573 patients (70.7% men) with a mean age of (66.3 ± 11.1) years. During the 11 years of follow-up, 5866 (15.6%) patients died. Multivariable analysis confirmed that the risk of death was the lowest among the preobese patients (27.5 = BMI