When a physician assesses your risk for heart disease, weight is most certainly a consideration, and often a waist measurement will be taken. But a recent study points to fat necks being a risk factor for heart disease also.
If you have too much fat, especially in the waist area (known technically as visceral adipose tissue), you're at higher risk for health problems like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes; not to mention heart disease and stroke.
These factors are the measurements of choice in determining the risk of heart disease.
Now, there's a new study, just presented at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association that suggests using a person's neck size may be just as accurate as waist measurement for determining heart disease risk.
Your heart health may not depend so much on how heavy you are, but rather on where the fat in your body is stored.
"It's very interesting that neck circumference was associated with [higher measures of] heart disease risk," said Dr. Vijay Nambi, a cardiologist at the Baylor College of Medicine, who was not involved with the research. He feels that if these results hold up after further study, then it may well change the way doctors assess your heart disease risk.
Earlier work has suggested that neck circumference could be linked with health problems like diabetes, insulin resistance or hypertension.
The team evaluated more than 3,300 men and women (average age 51) who were offspring of the original subjects who took part in the Framingham Heart Study, a decades long project of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and Boston University.
Average neck circumferences were 40.5 cm for men; 34.2 cm for women.
As neck measurements went up, so too did risk factors for heart disease.
They suggest that those with bigger necks may be displaying a "crude measure" of upper body fat, associated with heart disease risks.
The research found that those with trim waistlines appeared at greater risk if they had larger necks.
The risk was defined as having low levels of "good" cholesterol (under 40 mg/dl for men; 50 mg/dl for women), or higher levels of blood sugar (under 100 mg/dl is okay). The "bad" cholesterol didn't seem to be impacted by increasing neck size.
And while the larger necklines increased the risk no matter what the waistline measurement, if the neck and waist were both larger than average, the heart disease risk was compounded.
Said another way... the danger is independent of how fat your stomach is.
"What you don't want is fat around your liver or heart, and this can happen even if you look fine on the outside," says professor Jimmy Bell, of the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre.
Measuring the neck is a whole lot quicker and easier than the CT scan needed to measure visceral adipose tissue, the deep lying fat that surrounds your inner organs and is of such concern to doctors.
It may be that the fat in both neck and gut is of concern, and could each contribute to your risk of heart disease.
While neck measurements will likely never be used on their own, they offer some intriguing possibilities.
Remember too that in the end, it doesn't matter where the fat is located - neck or waist - carrying more than you should is not good for your heart.
You need to take steps to reduce the demands you're placing on this very vital organ by making healthier lifestyle choices.
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