Heavy people get heart attacks 12 years sooner. The fatter you are, the more likely you are to have a heart attack earlier in life, a new study shows. “Basically, it is showing that as people got progressively more obese, the rate at which they had heart attacks early went up dramatically,” said Dr. Eric D. Peterson, a professor of medicine at Duke University Medical Center’s Division of Cardiology and a member of the group reporting the findings. Cardiologists at several institutions studied data on more than 111,000 people who had heart attacks, looking specifically at body mass index (BMI), a measure of obesity, HealthDay reports. Someone with a BMI of 30 or above is regarded as obese; a person 5 feet, 7 inches tall who weighs 192 pounds has a BMI of 30. The average age of a first heart attack for people with a BMI of 18.5 or under was 74.6 years. For people with a BMI of 40 or over, it was 58.7 years. The age at which a first heart attack occurred went up steadily with increasing BMI – 3.5 years earlier for a BMI of 25 to 30; 6.8 years earlier for a BMI 30 to 35; 9.4 years for a BMI of 35 to 40; and 12 years earlier for a BMI 40 or higher. “The news here is that heart muscle in obese diabetic individuals can be mobilized by eating less,” said Dr. Heinrich Taegtmeyer, professor of medicine in cardiology at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in Houston and co-author of an accompanying editorial comment.

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