Being obese can actually be a life saver after hospitalisation: study

NEW YORK: Obesity brings with it many health ills, but there could be one silver lining, new research shows.

If you’re in hospital suffering from an infectious disease, you’re half as likely to die if you’re overweight or obese, Danish researchers report.

For the study, Sigrid Gribsholt, from Aarhus University Hospital’s department of clinical epidemiology, and colleagues collected data on more than 35 000 patients hospitalised for infections from 2011 to 2015.

Among these patients, the investigators looked at whether weight affected the risk of dying in the three months after discharge.

Gribsholt’s team found that for underweight patients, the risk of dying was two times higher than for patients of normal weight.

That seemed tied, however, to recent weight loss because of some underlying disease.

Deaths did not increase for underweight patients who had not recently lost weight.

The surprise finding was that overweight patients were 40% less likely to die and obese patients were 50% less likely to die, compared with normal-weight patients.

Among obese patients, whether they had recent changes in weight, other medical conditions or if they smoked, had little effect on the risk of dying, the findings showed.

“Overweight and obesity were associated with substantially reduced 90-day mortality following incident hospital admission for infection,” the researchers wrote.

Similar findings arose in three other studies also presented at the meeting:

In a study jointly conducted by researchers in the United States and Taiwan, a look at the medical records from nearly 1.7 million Americans hospitalised with pneumonia found that the odds of dying fell by 20 to 30% if the patient was overweight or obese.

A study conducted by the same team, using the same database, found that hospitalised overweight or obese patients were also about 22 to 23% less likely to die from the blood infection sepsis, compared with normal-weight patients. A study led by Dutch researchers at the Erasmus MC, University Medical Centre Rotterdam found that, in a group of 26 seriously ill patients, the nine who were obese were less likely to undergo rapid muscle wasting.

The same did not apply to their normal-weight peers.

But obesity expert Dr Mitchell Roslin said the so-called “obesity paradox” – where a normally unhealthy weight appears to have some health benefit – “has to be kept in perspective”.