Obesity as Compared With Physical Activity in Predicting Risk of Coronary Heart Disease in Women

Abstract

Background— The comparative importance of physical inactivity and obesity as predictors of coronary heart disease (CHD) risk remains unsettled. Methods and Results— We followed 88 393 women, 34 to 59 years of age, in the Nurses’ Health Study from 1980 to 2000. These participants did not have cardiovascular disease and cancer at baseline. We documented 2358 incident major CHD events (including nonfatal myocardial infarction and fatal CHD) during 20 years of follow-up, including 889 cases of fatal CHD and 1469 cases of nonfatal myocardial infarction. In a multivariate model adjusting for cardiovascular risk factors, overweight and obesity were significantly associated with increased risk of CHD, whereas increasing levels of physical activity were associated with a graded reduction in CHD risk ( P 2 ) and were physically active (exercise ≥3.5 h/wk) as the reference group, the relative risks of CHD were 3.44 (95% confidence interval [CI], 2.81 to 4.21) for women who were obese (BMI ≥30 kg/m ² ) and sedentary (exercise Conclusions— Obesity and physical inactivity independently contribute to the development of CHD in women. These data underscore the importance of both maintaining a healthy weight and regular physical activity in preventing CHD.