High blood pressure may be bigger risk than extra weight

If you are overweight, new research shows how important it is to control your blood pressure besides trying to lose extra pounds.

Scientists studying nearly 250,000 people in France found that only overweight people who had high blood pressure were at significantly greater risk of dying of heart-related problems than people of normal weight. Overweight people with normal blood pressure faced no increased risk.

This doesn’t mean that extra pounds aren’t dangerous, because overweight people are more likely to develop blood pressure problems.

But it does for the first time show that blood pressure may be an important “mediator,” or mechanism by which excess weight can cause heart problems, said one expert who reviewed the work, Dr. Frank Hu, an associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health.

“This novel finding deserves careful consideration,” he wrote in an editorial accompanying the findings of the study, published Tuesday in Hypertension: Journal of the American Heart Association.

Health experts have long agreed that obesity raises the risk of premature death, but they argue about how dangerous it is to be merely overweight. A controversial study earlier this year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that people who were overweight but not obese might even be less likely to die than those who are thinner.

The new study found that overweight people have a greater risk of dying in general, as well as from cardiovascular causes. But when researchers took into account things that raise heart risks, like high cholesterol, diabetes and high blood pressure (hypertension), only high blood pressure made a difference in the risk of dying.

“This study shows that hypertension is most important and is extremely common among people who are overweight and obese,” Hu said.

The new study involved 139,562 men and 104,236 women who had routine health checkups at a clinic in Paris from 1972 to 1988.