Losing Weight Could Increase the Risk of Death for Older Adults, New Research Shows

Losing Weight Could Increase the Risk of Death for Older Adults, New Research Shows
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Losing weight often requires a lot of effort. Perhaps each and every man out there wants to have a fit and muscular body in order to be a big hit with the ladies, but it sometimes just isn’t a good idea.

If you’re an older adult who aims to do a little workout in order to lose weight, a new study that CNN tells us about brings some bad news for you. The research associates weight loss of older adults with early death and even life-limiting conditions.

Looking at a huge amount of data for the new study

For their new study in question, researchers analyzed the data belonging to 17,000 adults from Australia who are at least 70 years old and over 2,000 individuals from the US who are at least 65. Over a period of four years, all of the individuals who participated in the study were weighed annually.

The new study excluded individuals who had been dealing with certain conditions, such as dementia, cardiovascular disease, chronic illness, or physical disabilities.

In an email sent to CNN, Perri Halperin from the Mount Sinai Health System explained:

It also excluded those with recent hospitalizations, which is important because hospitalization is often followed by weight loss due to acute conditions.

He also added, as CNN quotes:

No questions were asked about changes in activity level and diet quality between the baseline study visit and subsequent study visits, so we do not have any information on how those factors may have impacted the results.

Just so that the new research in question becomes even more surprising, it has been concluded that weight gain, on the other hand, was NOT associated with mortality. This is surprising considering that excessive weight has long been considered by experts as a potential cause of developing various diseases, such as diabetes, cardiovascular problems, depression, anxiety, and even some types of cancer.

The new study was published in JAMA Network Open.


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Even since he was a child, Cristian was staring curiously at the stars, wondering about the Universe and our place in it. Today he's seeing his dream come true by writing about the latest news in astronomy. Cristian is also glad to be covering health and other science topics, having significant experience in writing about such fields.

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