THURSDAY, Sept. 26, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- “Body roundness” could be a better measure than BMI at predicting how excess weight might affect a person’s heart health, a new study finds.

People who developed a high Body Roundness Index during a six-year period had a 163% increased risk of heart disease, researchers found, and even a moderate BRI was linked with a 61% increased risk.

“Our findings indicate that six years of moderate-to-high stable BRI appeared to increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, suggesting that BRI measurements may potentially be used as a predictive factor for cardiovascular disease incidence,” said senior investigator Dr. Yun Qian, a researcher of chronic non-communicable disease control at Nanjing Medical University’s Wuxi Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Body Roundness Index (BRI) compares a person’s waist circumference to their height, providing an estimate of their excess abdominal fat.

By comparison, body-mass index only compares a person’s weight to their height. Some have criticized the BMI as an inaccurate measure of obesity -- for example, very fit athletes can have a high BMI due to their heavy muscle mass.

For the study, researchers tracked the BRI of nearly 10,000 adults in China 45 and older during the 2010s.

BRI reflects not just a person’s belly fat, but also their amount of visceral fat -- the fat packed in around the organs that’s thought to do the most damage related to excess weight, experts said.

Researchers analyzed how people’s BRI changed over time, and found that increasing and higher BRI was significantly associated with a risk of heart disease, stroke, heart attack and other heart-related diseases.

This risk persisted even after researchers accounted for other risks associated with heart health like blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol levels, results showed.

“Obesity has also been shown to lead to inflammation and other mechanisms in the body that can affect the heart and cardiac functioning,” Qian said.

The new study was published Sept. 25 in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

More information

Harvard Medical School has more about the Body Roundness Index.

SOURCE: American Heart Association, news release, Sept. 25, 2024