Dropping weight won't add years in elderly: Study

Improvements in diet in obese are linked to blood pressure, cholesterol and diabetes benefits, including in elderly.

Dieting to lose weight may not help older overweight adults live any longer, suggests a new study.

But dropping a few pounds on purpose also does not seem to cause any harm to the elderly -- which had been a concern raised by previous studies, researchers wrote in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

"There is a general sense in geriatrics...that weight-loss is a bad thing," said study author Stephen Kritchevsky, from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Improvements in diet and weight loss in the overweight and obese are linked to blood pressure, cholesterol and diabetes benefits, including in the elderly.

Still, "there's been a little bit of a conundrum on whether it's a wise thing or not to ask an overweight older adult to lose weight."

That's because some research has linked weight loss in older adults with a higher rate of death -- probably because unintentional weight loss in the elderly is often due to an underlying illness, Kritchevsky added.

While the new findings don't show that dropping weight can extend an older adult's life, "if an older person is overweight or obese and has weight-related health conditions, they should not be concerned that losing weight would be bad for them," he concluded.

For now, Kritchevsky called the findings "a reassuring message that weight loss is potentially beneficial regardless of your age, if you're overweight or obese."

And even if losing weight might not add a lot of years to an elderly person's life, it can have many other health benefits, he added -- from easing disease risks to making activities like walking up the stairs easier and reducing osteoarthritis pain.