Long-term impact of the metabolic status on weight loss-induced health benefits

While short-term effects of weight loss on quality of life and metabolic aspects appear to be different in metabolically healthy (MHO) and metabolically unhealthy obese (MUO), respective long-term data is still missing. Given the high relevance of long-term changes, we aimed to address these in this post-hoc analysis of the MAINTAIN trial. We analyzed 143 overweight/obese subjects (BMI ≥ 27 kg/m , age ≥ 18 years) before and after a 3-month weight loss program (≥ 8% weight loss), after a 12-month period of a randomized weight maintenance intervention (n = 121), and after another 6 months without intervention (n = 112). Subjects were retrospectively grouped into MHO and MUO by the presence of metabolic syndrome and secondarily by estimates of insulin sensitivity (HOMA-IR and ISI ). Quality of life (QoL), blood pressure, lipids, HOMA-IR, and ISI were assessed and evaluated using mixed model analyses. Despite similar short- and long-term weight loss, weight loss-induced improvement of HOMA-IR was more pronounced in MUO than MHO after 3 months (MHO: 2.4[95%-CI: 1.9-2.9] vs. 1.6[1.1-2.1], p = 0.004; MUO: 3.6[3.2-4.0] vs. 2.0[1.6-2.4], p