Overweight Elderly Have Similar Mortality to Normal-Weight Elderly

Not so fast.

Current body mass index (BMI) thresholds for overweight and obesity may be overly restrictive for older people, according to the authors of a cohort study published online January 27 and in the February print edition of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society...

Limitations of this study include observational design, measurement of height and weight only once at study entry, use of BMI as a surrogate measure of body fat, reliance on self-reported height and weight, and lack of generalizability to older people who are frail and at risk for death.

In addition to the limitations which are severe (e.g., weight was measured only at the start of the study which extended for 10 years), there are no data on morbidity, i.e., illness.

Survival is a miserable/misleading end-point when the life is spent confined to a wheelchair, on a ventilator, in a nursing facility, etc.

Though I believe that some extra weight may be good for older persons, whether overweight is good is another story.

And that one is unfinished.