Figure 2
From: Obesity Paradox, Obesity Orthodox, and the Metabolic Syndrome: An Approach to Unity
(A) The authors describe “a remarkably consistent inverse logarithmic relationship between TB incidence and BMI, across studies that had been carried out over the past 50 years in diverse study populations with a large variation in average TB incidence, and which had controlled for various sets of confounders” (10). (B) Obesity reduces risk of tuberculosis. Hazard function curves illustrating morbidity with active tuberculosis for different BMI categories. Individuals with a low BMI have an increased risk of active tuberculosis. The opposite is true for individuals with high BMI, illustrating the protective effect of obesity. These data were reformulated for the Hong Kong curve in Figure 2A (11). (C) This figure depicts the probability of individuals in the inaugural NHANES study remaining free of tuberculosis from 1971–1992 (stratified by initial BMI into four groups) (12).