Despite their greater life expectancy, the adults of today are less “metabolically” healthy than their counterparts of previous generations, according to a new study from the Netherlands.
Assessing the trends, the investigators concluded that “the more recently born generations are doing worse”, and warn “that the prevalence of metabolic risk factors and the lifelong exposure to them have increased and probably will continue to increase”.
The study analysed data on more than 6,000 individuals in the Doetinchem Cohort Study, which began in 1987 with follow-up examinations after six, 11, and 16 years.(1,2) The principal risk factors measured were body weight, blood pressure, total cholesterol levels (for hypercholesterolaemia) and levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, which is considered “protective”.
The subjects were stratified by sex and generation at baseline into ten-year age groups (20, 30, 40, and 50 years); the follow-up analyses aimed to determine whether one generation had a different risk profile from a generation born ten years earlier – what the investigators called a “generation shift”.
Results showed that the prevalence of overweight, obesity, and hypertension increased with age in all generations, but in general the more recently born generations had a higher prevalence of these risk factors than generations born ten years earlier.
For example, 40 percent of the males who were in their 30s at baseline were classified as overweight; 11 years later the prevalence of overweight among the second generation of men in their 30s had increased to 52 percent (a statistically significant generational shift). In women these unfavourable changes in weight were only evident between the most recently born generations, in which the prevalence of obesity doubled in just 10 years.
The study was recently presented in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology. (ANI)