The association of measures of body shape and adiposity with incidence of cardiometabolic disease from an ageing perspective

While obesity increases the risk of developing cardiometabolic diseases (CMDs), these associations seem to attenuate with increasing age, albeit studied poorly. The present study aimed to investigate the associations between adiposity and CMDs in sex-specific groups of chronological age and leukocyte telomere length (LTL) as a measure of biological age. We investigated the associations between BMI, a body shape index, waist-to-hip ratio (adjusted for BMI) and total body fat, and incident coronary artery disease (CAD), type 2 diabetes (T2D) and ischemic stroke (IS) in 413,017 European-ancestry participants of the UK Biobank without CMD at baseline. We assessed the change in the associations between adiposity and CMD over strata of increasing chronological age or decreasing LTL. Participants (56% women) had a median (IQR) age of 57.0 (50.0–63.0) years. The median follow-up time was 12 years. People with higher BMI had a higher risk of incident CAD (HR 1.14 (95% confidence interval [CI] 1.13, 1.16)), T2D (HR 1.70 (95% CI 1.68, 1.72)) and IS (HR 1.09 (95% CI 1.06, 1.12)). In groups based on chronological age and LTL, adiposity measures were associated with higher risk of CAD and T2D in both men and women, but these associations attenuated with increasing chronological age (P(interactions) < 0.001), but not with decreasing LTL (P(interaction) men = 0.85; P(interaction) women = 0.27). Increased (abdominal) adiposity was associated with higher risk of incident CMDs, which attenuated with increasing chronological age but not with decreasing LTL. Future research may validate these findings using different measures of biological age. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11357-022-00654-9.