Study Claims Obesity Rivals Smoking as Contributor to “Burden of Disease”
A forthcoming study has reportedly concluded that, in terms of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) lost, “the overall health burden of obesity among U.S. adults has increased consistently since 1993” and now rivals the overall health burden of smoking. Haomiao Jia and Erica Lubetkin, “Trends in Quality-Adjusted Life Years Lost Contributed by Smoking and Obesity: Does the Burden of Obesity Overweight [sic] the Burden of Smoking?,” American Journal of Preventative Medicine, February 2010.
Researchers examined “the trend of the health burden of smoking and obesity for U.S. adults from 1993 to 2008 using currently available population-based data” obtained from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which has interviewed more than 3.5 million individuals. Designed to quantify the years gained by a health intervention while adjusting for quality of life, QALYs apparently use “preference-based measurements of health-related quality of life (HRQOL) to provide an assessment of the overall burden of diseases associated with both mortality and morbidity.”
For obesity and smoking, the authors calculated the total QALYs lost as “the sum of the QALYs lost due to a decrease in HRQOL score (morbidity) and the future QALYs lost in the expected life-years due to premature deaths (mortality) contributed by the two modifiable risk factors.” The results apparently indicated that “because of the marked increase in the proportion of obese people, obesity has become an equal, if not greater, contributor to the burden of disease than smoking.” In addition,“[s]moking had a bigger impact on mortality than morbidity, whereas obesity had a bigger impact on morbidity than mortality,” wrote the authors, who maintained that their data “might assist in the construction of specified quantitative targets for the Healthy People 2020 health objectives and setting priorities for prevention in a given population as well as according to sociodemographic subgroups.” See Science Daily, January 5, 2010.
