Increasing rates of obesity and severe obesity may presage increased rates of heart failure, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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The good news is heart failure in people with severe obesity may be reversible with common weight loss drugs. The bad news is both obesity, with BMIs of around 30, and severe obesity, with a BMI of 42 or greater, are increasing in frequency and may lead to increasing numbers of people with heart failure. David Kass, a cardiologist at Johns Hopkins and one author of a study looking carefully at the relationship between severe obesity, heart failure and GLP-1 agonists, comments.

Kass: People are recognizing and that's really what we see here, 35 might seem like a high BMI but 35 really wasn't doing it as much it's really 40. That might have seemed to be a very small percent of the population in some countries, it is Asia but certainly in the US throughout the country this is not an unusual number. And it's becoming increasingly common. It really is an interaction of these two things that makes this happen that it's not just that obesity does this I think that's very clear.    :33

At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.