Women who experienced one or more traumatic lifetime events or several negative events in recent years had higher odds of being obese than women who didn’t report such stress, according to preliminary research presented at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2017, a premier global exchange of the latest advances in cardiovascular science for researchers and clinicians.
“Little is known about how negative and traumatic life events affect obesity in women. We know that stress affects behaviour, including whether people under- or overeat, as well as neuro-hormonal activity by in part increasing cortisol production, which is related to weight gain,” said study senior author Michelle A. Albert, M.D., M.P.H., professor of medicine, cardiology, and founding director of the Center for the Study of Adversity and Cardiovascular Disease, at University of California, San Francisco.
Obesity, a preventable risk factor for cardiovascular and other diseases, impacts more than one-third of U.S. adults. According to the American Heart Association, nearly 70 percent of American adults are either overweight or obese. Women tend to live longer than men, putting especially obese, aging women at greater risk for disease, said study author Eva M. Durazo, Ph.D., a post-doctoral scholar at the NURTURE Center, Division of Cardiology, and UCSF said.
The researchers studied the relationship between major life events and obesity in a group of 21,904 middle-aged and older women, focusing on women with the highest obesity prevalence. They defined obesity as having a body mass index (BMI) of 30 kg/m2 or higher. And, they measured the impacts of two types of stress: traumatic events, which could occur anytime in a woman’s life and includes events as death of a child or being a victim of a serious physical attack, as well as negative life events that had occurred in the previous five years of a woman’s life. Negative events included wanting employment but being unemployed for longer than three months or being burglarized.
Sleep deprivation may increase risk of cardiovascular disease in older women Older women who don’t get enough sleep were more likely to have poor cardiovascular health, according to preliminary research presented at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2017. In the new study researchers considered sleeping at least two hours more during the weekend than on the weekday as a sign of being in state debt. Among the roughly 21,500 female health professionals between ages of 60 and 84 the research team followed, women who were in sleep debt were more likely to be obese and have hypertension. When taking into account socioeconomic status and sources of stress, such as negative life events and work-related stress that could also influence cardiovascular health, quality of sleep was still an important factor for good overall cardiovascular health. The results suggest that not getting enough sleep during the week might throw the body off and may increase risk of cardiovascular disease in older women.