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Obesity is usually said to be the cause of heart dieses and other heart conditions, but could weight circumference and being obese provide some protective benefits?

According to a new UCLA study, men and women suffering with advanced heart failure and obesity are at significantly less risk for adverse outcomes.

Nearly 6 million people suffer from heart failure and almost 66 percent of those people are overweight or obese.

"The study provides us with more insight about how both genders of heart failure patients may be impacted by the obesity paradox," said senior author Dr. Tamara Horwich, an assistant professor of cardiology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "Heart failure may prove to be one of the few health conditions where extra weight may prove to be protective."

Researchers looked at over 3,000 patients treated for heart failure between 1983 and 2011 at UCLA Medical Center. Of the sample, 2,718 patients had their BMI measured at the beginning of heart failure treatment and 469 patients had their waist circumference measured at the beginning of treatment.

For men, a high waist circumference was considered to be 40 inches or greater and for women, 37 inches or greater.

According to researchers, "in men, a high waist circumference and high BMI were associated with event-free survival from adverse outcomes like death, the need for a heart transplant, or the need for ventricular assist device placement. Women with a higher BMI also had better outcomes than their normal-weight counterparts, and women with a high waist circumference also trended toward improved outcomes."

"We knew that obesity might provide a protective benefit for heart failure patients, but we didn't know whether this obesity paradox applied specifically to women with heart failure, as well as men - and it does," Horwich said.

On the other hand, "normal waist circumference was also associated with an increased risk of adverse outcomes in both genders, with men's risk doubling and women's risk tripling."

"The study also demonstrates how BMI and waist circumference can be used together to provide a more accurate measure of fat in the body to help determine obesity and assess risk," said the study's first author, Adrienne L. Clark, a resident in the department of medicine at the Geffen School of Medicine.

The next steps in research will include larger studies with longer follow-up times, as well as a closer look at the physiology behind the obesity paradox.

The study findings are published in the July 1 online issue of the American Journal of Cardiology.