If you're already obese at age 25 you're likely to be facing a future of serious weight problems after 35, including severe obesity.
Writing in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, researchers said men classified obese by age 25 faced a 23 percent probability of even more severe obesity after the age of 35 compared to the 1.1 percent risk for men of normal weight.
The risk for women was even greater, with the chance of severe later obesity increasing to 47 percent for women judged obese at 25, as compared to 5 percent for normal-weight women.
A severe level of obesity in later life increases the risk of complications including diabetes and high blood pressure.
There is growing evidence that long-term obesity can also create or aggravate other chronic conditions with possible impacts on mobility in later life and the possibility of musculoskeletal disease.
Their study was based on data from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 1999 to 2010.
There was some good news in the study, including the finding that a person's present weight, not the length of time they were obese, was a better predictor of metabolic and cardiovascular risk.
That suggests dropping weight at any age of life may reduce those risks, even if the person was obese for an extended duration, says study lead author Jennifer B. Dowd of the City University of New York's School of Public Health.
"The current findings suggest that the biological risks of longer-term obesity are primarily due to the risk of more severe obesity later in life among those obese early in life, rather than the impact of long-term obesity per se," she says. "This is good news in some respects, as overweight and obese young adults who can prevent additional weight gain can expect their biological risk factors to be no worse than those who reach the same level of BMI [body mass index) later in life."
The study findings are helping in understanding effects of being overweight in both the short term and the long term.
"Prevention of weight gain at all ages should thus be a clinical and public health priority," co-author of the study Anna Zajacova at the University of Wyoming said.
