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A BULGING waistline may be a sign that you’re at increased risk of stroke.

Seung-Han Suk at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York and his colleagues studied 576 stroke victims and 1142 matched controls. They measured the volunteers’ waist-to-hip ratio and their body mass index—their weight in kilograms divided by the square of their height in metres.

To the researchers’ surprise, the control group had a higher mean BMI—a measure of overall obesity—than the stroke victims. But those who had strokes were more likely to have a big gut relative to their hips. Suk told a meeting of the American Academy of Neurology in Denver this week that abdominal fat distribution may be a better predictor of stroke risk, particularly among young people and those of normal weight.