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 For people with coronary artery disease, rapidly losing and regaining weight — or “yo-yo” dieting — may increase the risk for deadly heart attacks and strokes, a new study suggests. Lead study author Dr. Sripal Bangalore, of the Cardiovascular Clinical Research Center at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York, and colleagues recently reported their results in the New England Journal of Medicine. Scientists prospectively followed 9,509 men and women with stable coronary artery disease, examining them and recording their weight an average of 12 times over five years.  Coronary artery disease develops when the major blood vessels that supply your heart with blood, oxygen and nutrients (coronary arteries) become damaged or diseased. Eventually, the decreased blood flow may cause chest pain (angina), shortness of breath, or other coronary artery disease signs and symptoms. Subjects with the greatest changes in body weight experienced a weight fluctuation of up to 3.9 kilograms (around 8.6 pounds) during follow-up, while those with the smallest body weight changes had weight fluctuations of 0.9 kilograms (around 2 pounds). After adjusting for other risk factors, they found that compared with the one-fifth of people with the lowest weight variability, the one-fifth with the highest had a 78 percent higher risk of new onset diabetes, a 117 percent higher risk of heart attack, a 136 percent higher risk of stroke, and a 124 percent higher risk of death.
– Losing weight is one thing, keeping it off quite another. And now researchers are finding that among those with coronary heart disease (CHD)—which the Mayo Clinic reports develops from damaged or diseased blood vessels typically caused by blockage and inflammation—yo-yo dieting may dramatically increase the risk of stroke, heart attack, and death. Reporting in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers say they followed nearly 10,000 men and women with CHD between the ages of 35 and 75 for about five years, monitoring changes in body weight and other health outcomes. The takeaway? "It's important to lose weight, but this data says you have to keep it off," lead researcher Dr. Sripal Bangalore at the New York University School of Medicine tells the New York Times. The highest weight fluctuation was on average 8.6 pounds over five years, while the smallest body weight changes averaged closer to two pounds, reports Medical News Today. Those who were already overweight or obese at the beginning of the study and who experienced the highest level of weight fluctuation experienced 124% more deaths, 136% more strokes, and 117% more heart attacks, meaning these CHD patients were more than twice as likely to suffer these negative outcomes in just a few years than people with CHD whose weight only fluctuated two pounds. This doesn't pinpoint a cause, as pre-existing heart problems could be the culprit, but researchers hope to study this correlation further. (Yo-yo dieting is bad for women's hearts in general.)