An April 13, 2016 issue of New England Journal of Medicine concluded that an increased BMI(Body Mass Index) in late adolescence was strongly associated with cardiovascular morbidity and mortality in young adulthood or midlife.

From the Article

Overweight and obesity in adolescents have increased substantially in recent decades and affect a third of the adolescent population in some developed countries.1 Obesity early in life is considered to be a risk factor for death from cardiovascular disease and from all causes in adulthood,2-5 although not all investigators concur6; such obesity may limit the increase in life expectancy that otherwise would be achieved.7,8 Despite progress in prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease, cardiovascular mortality among young adults either has not declined or the decline has slowed over recent decades in several developed countries coincident with the obesity epidemic.9,10 Some,2,3,11 although not all,12 studies suggest that a body-mass index (BMI, the weight in kilograms divided by the square of the height in meters) that falls within the upper-normal range in adolescence is associated with an increased risk of death from cardiovascular causes, although a determination of the BMI threshold that is associated with such an increased risk of remains uncertain. Thus, our main objective was to assess the risk of fatal cardiovascular events in adulthood according to the BMI range during adolescence. We also estimated the predicted proportion of cardiovascular deaths that could be attributed to the increasing prevalence of overweight and obesity among adolescents.Our study was based on a national database of 2.3 million Israeli adolescents in whom height and weight were measured between 1967 and 2010. We assessed the association between the BMI in late adolescence and death from coronary heart disease, stroke, and sudden death in adulthood.

Source: Body-Mass Index in 2.3 Million Adolescents and Cardiovascular Death in Adulthood — NEJM