Commentary: Obesity-years—a new metric to measure health effects of obesity

A selection of abstracts of clinically relevant papers from other journals. The abstracts on this page have been chosen and edited by John R. Radford.

Abstract

Obesity-years, akin to 'pack-years' when quantifying cigarette smoking, may be the most useful measure for studying deleterious effects.

Main

de Koning L, Hu FB. Int J Epidemiol 2011; 40: 996–997

Although obesity is associated with type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and tumours, 'the absolute risk per year is quite small'. This commentary summarises and reflects on the substantive paper published is this edition of the journal (Asnawi A, Wolfe R et al. Int J Epidemiol 2011; 40: 985–996). In this study, BMI was measured every 2 years. The investigators found that when controlling for numerous confounders, those who were obese (BMI ≥30 kg/m²) over the whole period of >25 years, were 2.5 times more likely to die compared with those who had never been obese. Not only then is the measure of obesity-years analogous to 'pack-years' for quantifying cigarette smoking, but there is a further link in that obesity 'may undo longevity gains in Western countries that were made by reducing smoking rates.'