It’s no secret that abdominal obesity and generally being overweight has been proven to take a toll on your health, particularly on your heart as it’s usually associated with increased blood pressure, cholesterol level and decreased nutrition. However, a new study has highlighted how your neck could be the ultimate indicator of heart failure or disease.
Published in the Nutrition Journal, the study found that looking at a person’s neck circumference could “improve the predictive ability of individuals’ heart failure risk”. The study also looked at body mass index and the visceral adiposity index, a mathematical model used to identify higher values of belly fat found deep in the abdominal cavity.
It also linked the combination of these three checks with a higher risk of heart failure. The Chinese study took nearly 90,000 participants aged between 18 and 80 who didn’t have any records of cardiovascular disease.
These people were monitored through surveys for nearly a decade, with verified reports of heart failure being identified by cardiologists throughout the years. During a follow-up roughly five and a half years after the study started, it highlighted that participants with the highest neck circumferences, roughly larger than 39cm, were “significantly associated with a high risk of heart failure”.
The study reasoned that additional fatty tissue in the neck region secretes a number of chemicals that activate inflammation, damage the lining of blood vessels and oxidative stress which damages cells. People with larger neck circumferences were also found to be more likely to face obstructive sleep issues like sleep apnea, or snoring, and while this could be indicative of a neck circumference wide enough to be linked to heart failure the study didn’t find snoring influenced a person’s risk.
This is not the first study to highlight how the thickness of your neck could potentially be an early warning sign of health issues. A 2022 study in the Journal of the American Heart Association found a link between neck circumference and an increased risk of heart disease.
Researchers in the American study found patients were “much more likely” to develop atrial fibrillation, an irregular and rapid heart rhythm if they had a thick neck. The scientists noted: “Neck circumference has been shown to be associated with increased cardiovascular risk. There is evidence that free fatty acid release from upper‐body subcutaneous fat is higher compared with lower‐body subcutaneous fat.”
Free fatty acids have also previously been linked with other life-threatening diseases including cancer and type 2 diabetes. It has shown to contribute to insulin resistance and oxidative stress, which contribute to the pathology of heart failure as well.