What’s the Best Way to Manage Obesity?
The system for diagnosing and managing obesity can no longer be about just body mass index (BMI), which is excluding many people who would benefit from obesity treatment. A new framework for the diagnosis, staging and management of obesity in adults, launched today by the European Association for the Study of Obesity (EASO) and published in Nature Medicine, will propose modernising obesity diagnosis and treatment to take account of all the latest developments in the field, including the new generation of obesity medications.
Despite the wide recognition of obesity as a multifactorial, chronic, relapsing, non-communicable disease marked by an abnormal and/or excessive accumulation of body fat – in many settings, the diagnosis of obesity is still based solely on BMI cut-off values, and does not reflect the role of adipose tissue distribution and function in the severity of the disease. The EASO Steering Group, comprised of experts including current and former Association Presidents, have put together a series of statements on obesity diagnosis, staging and treatment that will move management of the condition in line with the latest scientific knowledge and developments.
The authors say: “An important novelty of our framework regards the anthropometric component of the diagnosis. The basis for this change is the recognition that BMI alone is insufficient as a diagnostic criterion, and that body fat distribution has a substantial effect on health. More specifically, the accumulation of abdominal fat is associated with an increased risk of developing cardiometabolic complications and is a stronger determinant of disease development than BMI, even in individuals with a BMI level below the standard cut-off values for obesity diagnosis (BMI of 30).”
Excerpted from EurekAlert!
