Doctors need to regard obesity as a disease and base any treatment on sound evidence, participants at the 16th European Congress on Obesity in Geneva were told last week. At the gathering, organised by the European Association for the Study of Obesity, more than 2500 experts met to discuss the problem and the need for increased resources.
Votjech Hainer, the association’s president, said: “We have a lack of human resources; we have a lack of obesity specialists; we have a lack of obesity management centres; and we have a lack of knowledge among physicians.” Constantine Tsigos, chair of the association’s task force for the study of obesity, said GPs and other doctors needed a better understanding of and guidance on how to manage obese patients.
In addition to recommending that doctors treat obesity as a disease, the task force also said that networks should be established to ensure cooperation between health professionals. The networks should include GPs, obesity specialists, nutritionists or dieticians, exercise physiologists, behavioural therapists, obesity surgeons, and patient support groups.
Professor Hainer told reporters the association is placing greater emphasis on primary health doctors and noted it had updated the European guidelines on obesity management in primary care.
Dr Tsigos said there was a lack of obesity centres in Europe and emphasised that it was important to harmonise obesity management across Europe.
He also said the rates of child obesity have been increasing dramatically in Europe (apart from some individual success stories in Switzerland and France) and in the rest of the world and called attention to the importance of the need for guidelines on child obesity.
Obesity had been identified as a major risk factor for some chronic non-communicable diseases, including cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and certain cancers.
“Obesity is responsible for 2-8% of health care costs and 10-13% of deaths in the European region,” Professor Hainer said. Worldwide, an estimated 1.6 billion adults are overweight, and at least 400 million are obese, Professor Hainer told delegates, noting that, in some European countries, the prevalence of obesity had doubled during the past two decades. More than half of Europeans were now either overweight or obese.
Data for England, France, Greece, Italy, Latvia, and Lithuania show that obesity rates have increased for both men and women, the congress was told. Cyprus, at 27%, had the highest prevalence in men in Europe, followed by England with a prevalence of 25%. The highest rate for women was found in England and Scotland at 25-26%.
Alain Golay, professor of medicine at the University of Geneva, said: “We cannot win the fight on obesity by ourselves.” He said that the battle must include a combination of approaches, including better new drugs to maintain weight loss, better nutrition, World Health Organization policies, clinical research, and better health insurance policies that reimbursed obesity treatment.
