LAUSR

Nowadays obesity is becoming a global epidemic and public health problem in both children and adults. It is associated with numerous comorbidities, such as atherosclerotic disease, chronic heart failure, arterial hypertension, atrial fibrillation. Of the many studies in this area, most have been conducted in males with women inadequately represented. As a consequence, until the study presented by Bjorck et al. in this issue of the journal, very little data on the effect of obesity on cardiovascular disease in young women existed: this is the first evidence about the risk for early heart failure (before age 65 years) in obese and overweight young women. The paper describes a uniquely large prospective cohort of young women (1,374,031 females) in their first or second pregnancy (from the Swedish Birth Register 1982–2014) and the association, through the Swedish National Inpatient Register, with risk of hospitalization for heart failure or of death in a median follow-up of 15.3 years. The authors found that the risk of early heart failure was strongly associated with increasing body weight: compared with lean women, the risk started to increase at high-normal body mass index (BMI) levels, and was nearly five-fold in women with a BMI 35 kg/m.