OVERWEIGHT

Abstract

The observation has been made repeatedly that in obese persons there is a relatively high incidence of hypertension and cardiovascular-renal diseases. The excessive mortality from these causes in the overweight group was long a matter of concern to life insurance companies, even before it was first adequately demonstrated in 1930 by Dublin.¹ Three years later Reed and Love² pointed out that obesity may precede the clinical signs of a circulatory or renal disorder. In reviewing the records of 5,021 army officers they found that those who were overweight after age 30 had a much greater expectancy of hypertension and cardiovascularrenal disease than those of average, or less than average, weight. They derived this fact from their data by noting, in retrospect, that the increase in weight often had occurred from ten to twenty years before the diagnosis became apparent. The present study was designed to determine the prognostic