Obesity Leaves More Americans With Physical Limitations

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Alley and her colleague, Dr. Virginia Chang, compared two sets of data collected for the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES). They looked at data from 1988 to 1994 and compared it to data from 1999 to 2004 on Americans over age 60.

The researchers looked for difficulties in two disability assessments: functional impairment and activities of daily living (ADL). Functional impairments include the inability to bend over to pick something up, walk one-quarter mile, walk up 10 stairs, lift 10 pounds and stand from an armless chair. Activities of daily living are more basic skills, such as the ability to feed and dress yourself.

Functional impairments increased 5.4 percent between the two study periods for obese individuals. During the final study period, obese people had nearly a threefold increased risk of a functional impairment compared to normal-weight peers. That represents a 43 percent increase in the likelihood of being functionally impaired for obese people, versus their counterparts of normal weight, the study said.

While the odds of having an activities-of-daily-living impairment didn't increase between the study periods, the odds of an obese person experiencing an activities-of-daily-living impairment were double that of a normal-weight person, because people of normal weight saw a decrease in ADL impairments.

"Obese elderly people have a higher risk of being disabled, and the gap is increasing," Alley said. "Obese older persons are experiencing a potentially preventable impairment. This is just one more reason we need to be concerned about obesity."

In the second study, U.S. government experts looked at specific causes of death based on weight. They also used data from NHANES but went back to 1971 and followed up through 2004.

Interestingly, they found that being overweight -- that's a body mass index (BMI, a ratio of weight to height) of 25 to 29.9 -- was not associated with an increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease and cancer. But overweight was linked to a decreased risk of death from non-cancer, non-cardiovascular disease causes. Being underweight -- a BMI of 18.5 or less -- was associated with a significantly higher risk of death from non-cancer, non-cardiovascular disease causes, according to the study.