Elevated All-Cause Mortality among Overweight Older People: AI Predicts a High Normal Weight Is Optimal

Abstract

It has been proposed that being overweight may provide an advantage with respect to mortality in older people, although this has not been investigated fully. Therefore, to confirm that and elucidate the underlying mechanism, we investigated mortality in older people using explainable artificial intelligence (AI) with the gradient-boosting algorithm XGboost. Baseline body mass indexes (BMIs) of 5699 people (79.3 ± 3.9 years) were evaluated to determine the relationship with all-cause mortality over eight years. In the unadjusted model, the first negative (protective) BMI range for mortality was 25.9–28.4 kg/m2. However, in the adjusted cross-validation model, this range was 22.7–23.6 kg/m2; the second and third negative BMI ranges were then 25.8–28.2 and 24.6–25.8 kg/m2, respectively. Conversely, the first advancing BMI range was 12.8–18.7 kg/m2, which did not vary across conditions with high feature importance. Actual and predicted mortality rates in participants aged <90 years showed a negative-linear or L-shaped relationship with BMI, whereas predicted mortality rates in men aged ≥90 years showed a blunt U-shaped relationship. In conclusion, AI predicted that being overweight may not be an optimal condition with regard to all-cause mortality in older adults. Instead, it may be that a high normal weight is optimal, though this may vary according to the age and sex.