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Obesity Disease Burden Similar to Smoking

Obesity is now as great a threat to quality of life as smoking and creates a similar burden of disease, researchers say. Over the past 15 years, U.S. patients have been getting heavier and at the same time fewer have been smokers, which has contributed to the shift, Haomiao Jia, PhD, of Columbia University, and Erica I. Lubetkin, MD, MPH, of the City University of New York, reported online in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. "In 2008, the quality-adjusted life years lost due to obesity is slightly higher than the quality-adjusted life years lost due to smoking," Jia told MedPage Today. "Smoking has a bigger impact on life expectancy," Jia said, but combined with the morbidity data, obesity and smoking "are about the same." Jia argued that the overall health burden of obesity has increased consistently since 1993, while smoking rates have fallen. So obesity has become "an equal, if not greater, contributor to the burden of disease as smoking." The two factors have the largest impact on morbidity and mortality in the U.S. To assess the health burden of these two modifiable risk factors between 1993 and 2008, the researchers looked at data on quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. QALYs are measurements of health-related quality of life, which allow a patient to respond to questions about his or her own quality of life. The researchers found that between 1993 and 2008, the proportion of smokers among U.S. adults fell by 18.5%, from 22.7% to 18.5%. But the proportion of obese patients increased 85%, from 14.5% to 26.7% Over that time, smoking-related QALYs were relatively stable at 0.0438 QALYs lost per population -- even though the percentage of adult smokers has been decreasing since 2002. This may be due to the "differences in peak prevalence of smoking and differences in susceptibility to smoking-associated conditions among subgroups of the population," the researchers wrote. In 1993, QALYs lost...

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