Most adults in the United States will be overweight or
obese by 2030, with related health care
spending projected to be as much as $956.9 billion,
according to researchers at the Johns Hopkins
Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Agency for
Healthcare Research and Quality, and the
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Their
results are published in the July online issue of
Obesity.
"National survey data show that the prevalence of
overweight and obese adults in the U.S. has
increased steadily over the past three decades," said Youfa
Wang, lead author of the study and
associate professor with the Bloomberg School's
Center for
Human Nutrition. "If these trends
continue, more than 86 percent of adults will be overweight
or obese by 2030, with approximately 96
percent of non-Hispanic black women and 91 percent of
Mexican-American men affected. This would
result in one of every six health care dollars spent in
total direct health care costs paying for
overweight and obesity-related costs."
The researchers conducted projection analyses based on
data collected over the past three
decades from nationally representative surveys. Their
projections illustrate the potential burden of
the U.S. obesity epidemic if current trends continue. May
A. Beydoun, a former postdoctoral research
fellow at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public
Health, said that the analysis also shows that
over time heavy Americans become heavier.
According to Wang, "The health care costs attributable
to obesity and overweight are expected
to more than double every decade. This would account for 15
[percent] to 17 percent of total health
care costs spent," she said. "Due to the assumptions we
made and the limitations of the available data,
these figures are likely an underestimation of the true
financial impact."
Current standards define adults with a body mass index
between 25 and 29.9 as overweight and
adults with a BMI of 30 or higher as obese. Both the
overweight and obese are at an increased risk
for developing a number of health conditions, including
hypertension, type 2 diabetes, heart disease
and stroke. Researchers estimate that children and young
adults may have a shorter life expectancy
than their parents if the obesity epidemic is left
unaddressed.
The authors warned that obesity has become a public
health crisis in the United States. Timely,
dramatic and effective development and implementation of
corrective programs and policies are
needed to avoid the otherwise inevitable health and
societal consequences implied by their
projections. If current trends continue, the researchers
said, the U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services will not meet its Healthy People 2010
initiative to increase the proportion of adults
who are at a healthy weight and to reduce the proportion of
adults who are obese.
Lan Liang, Benjamin Caballero and Shiriki Kumanyika
co-authored the study. The U.S.
Department of Agriculture and the National Institutes of
Health provided partial funding for the
research.
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