Health effects of overweight and obesity in 195 countries over 25 years
Published June 12, 2017, in NEJM (opens in a new window)
BACKGROUND
Although the rising pandemic of obesity has received major attention in many countries, the effects of this attention on trends and the disease burden of obesity remain uncertain.
METHODS
We analyzed data from 68.5 million persons to assess the trends in the prevalence of overweight and obesity among children and adults between 1980 and 2015. Using the Global Burden of Disease study data and methods, we also quantified the burden of disease related to high body mass index (BMI), according to age, sex, cause, and BMI in 195 countries between 1990 and 2015.
RESULTS
In 2015, a total of 107.7 million children and 603.7 million adults were obese. Since 1980, the prevalence of obesity has doubled in more than 70 countries and has continuously increased in most other countries. Although the prevalence of obesity among children has been lower than that among adults, the rate of increase in childhood obesity in many countries has been greater than the rate of increase in adult obesity. High BMI accounted for 4.0 million deaths globally, nearly 40% of which occurred in persons who were not obese. More than two thirds of deaths related to high BMI were due to cardiovascular disease. The disease burden related to high BMI has increased since 1990; however, the rate of this increase has been attenuated owing to decreases in underlying rates of death from cardiovascular disease.
CONCLUSIONS
The rapid increase in the prevalence and disease burden of elevated BMI highlights the need for continued focus on surveillance of BMI and identification, implementation, and evaluation of evidence-based interventions to address this problem.
Citation
The GBD 2015 Obesity Collaborators. Health effects of overweight and obesity in 195 countries over 25 years. New England Journal of Medicine. 12 Jun 2017. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa1614362
Authors
- Ashkan Afshin,
- Christopher J.L. Murray,
- Marissa Reitsma,
- Patrick Sur,
- Kara Estep,
- Alexander Lee,
- Laurie Marczak,
- Ali Mokdad,
- Maziar Moradi-Lakeh,
- Mohsen Naghavi,
- Joseph Salama,
- Theo Vos,
- Stan Biryukov,
- Kelly Cercy,
- Leslie Cornaby,
- Lalit Dandona,
- Rakhi Dandona,
- Audra Gold,
- Simon Hay,
- Heidi Larson,
- Stephen Lim,
- Patrick Liu,
- Rafael Lozano,
- Nikolas Reinig,
- Ben Zipkin
Datasets
All our datasets are housed in our data catalog, the Global Health Data Exchange (GHDx). Visit the GHDx to download data from this article.