The Influence of Obesity and Metabolic Health on Vascular Health

Abstract

The prevalence of obesity is rapidly increasing worldwide. Obesity should not be understood only as the accumulation of fat in the body, but instead as a phenomenon that exerts different effects on our health according to the place of fat deposition and its stability. Obesity is the starting point of most metabolic diseases, such as diabetes, hypertension, metabolic syndrome, sleep apnea, and eventually cardiovascular disease. There are different kinds of obesity, ranging from simple obesity to sarcopenic obesity. The main purpose of intervening to address obesity is to decrease the ultimate consequence of obesity-namely, cardiovascular disease. The main mechanism through which obesity, especially abdominal obesity, increases cardiovascular risk is the obesity-induced derangement of metabolic health, leading to the development of metabolic diseases such as diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and metabolic syndrome, which are the main initiators of vascular damage. In this review, I discuss the influence of various types of obesity on the risk of metabolic diseases, and how these diseases increase cardiovascular disease risk.

Keywords: Atherosclerosis; Cardiovascular diseases; Diabetes mellitus; Metabolism; Obesity; Vascular calcification.

Fig. 1

Obesity and its associations with metabolic diseases and vascular health.