High Blood Pressure Triggers Heart Disease in Obese

It's not the fat per se that leads to cardiovascular disease mortality among the obese, according to a team of researchers here. The real culprit is the high blood pressure that is part and parcel with obesity.

"The important message in our study is that we observed that cardiovascular risk is not clearly increased unless hypertension is present in these overweight and obese subjects," said Athanases Benetos, M.D., Ph.D., of the Medical School of Nancy. "In our population, if the subject didn't have hypertension we didn't find that the subject had an increased risk of cardiovascular disease."

But in men and women who were both overweight and hypertensive there was a doubling of the risk for fatal heart attacks and strokes, reported Dr. Benetos and colleagues in the Sept. 13 issue of Hypertension, Journal of the American Heart Association.

Read more: It's High Blood Pressure That Triggers Heart Disease in Obese