09/13/2016
Let's stop obesity now! 715,000 Americans have heart attacks every year!! Many older Americans have high blood pressure or high blood sugar or just a bit too much fat on the belly.
While each of these conditions alone is bad enough, having all of these conditions at once—a cluster called metabolic syndrome—magnifies the risk of developing heart disease and stroke. And NIA scientists may have discovered a reason why: Metabolic syndrome appears to accelerate stiffening and thickening of the arteries.
Metabolic syndrome—also known as syndrome X or insulin resistance syndrome—may affect as many as 47 million Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). After age 50, a person has a better than one in three chance of developing this group of medical conditions characterized by insulin resistance and the presence of obesity, abdominal fat, high blood sugar and triglycerides, low HDL (good) blood cholesterol, and high blood pressure.
To determine the effects of metabolic syndrome on aging arteries, NIA researchers studied 471 participants—average age 59—in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA). None of these participants had any detectable signs of cardiovascular disease when initially examined. But those who had three or more conditions associated with metabolic syndrome developed stiffer and thicker arteries at earlier ages than those who didn't have the syndrome.
"It's as if the metabolic syndrome makes your blood vessels older," says Angelo Scuteri, MD, PhD, an investigator at the NIA's Laboratory of Cardiovascular Science. "If you have metabolic syndrome, when you are 40 your arteries look like they are 55 or 60."