The 2014 Jan Kellerman Award for Young Israeli Investigator in Cardiology

The Israeli Heart Society awards each year the Jan Kellerman prize for outstanding works in cardiology that were conducted by an Israeli investigator younger than 40 years of age.

 One of the recipients of the 2014 prize is Dr. Gilad Twig from department medicine B and Talpiot leadership program in Sheba Medical Center.

 Dr. Twig and his colleagues assessed the effect of body mass index at age 17 on future mortality risk in a population of 2.16 million adolescents during the last 5 decades - the largest study that was done in this field. They have shown that the normal BMI range spans a much narrower range, compared to the one reported in the literature. It was also found that mortality rates among overweight and obese adolescents did not improve in the last 40 years, as opposed to adolescents with normal BMI. These suggest that pre-adulthood obesity may attenuate the natural progressive increase in life expectancy.