Obesity Might Help When Infection Strikes

If you’re in the hospital suffering from an infectious disease, you’re half as likely to die if you’re overweight or obese, Danish researchers report.

For the study, Sigrid Gribsholt, from Aarhus University Hospital’s department of clinical epidemiology, and colleagues collected data on more than 35,000 patients hospitalized for infections from 2011 to 2015.

Among these patients, the investigators looked at whether weight affected the risk of dying in the three months after discharge.  Gribsholt’s team found that for underweight patients, the risk of dying was two times higher than for patients of normal weight. That seemed tied, however, to recent weight loss due to some underlying disease. Deaths did not increase for underweight patients who had not recently lost weight.

The surprise finding was that overweight patients were 40 percent less likely to die and obese patients were 50 percent less likely to die, compared with normal-weight patients.

Among obese patients, whether they had recent changes in weight, other medical conditions or if they smoked had little effect on the risk of dying, the findings showed.

“Overweight and obesity were associated with substantially reduced 90-day mortality following incident hospital admission for infection,” the researchers wrote. more here: https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/news/20180525/obesity-might-help-when-infection-strikes?src=RSS_PUBLIC#1