68
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      Economic Burden of Obesity: A Systematic Literature Review

      review-article

      Read this article at

      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Background: The rising prevalence of obesity represents an important public health issue. An assessment of its costs may be useful in providing recommendations for policy and decision makers. This systematic review aimed to assess the economic burden of obesity and to identify, measure and describe the different obesity-related diseases included in the selected studies. Methods: A systematic literature search of studies in the English language was carried out in Medline (PubMed) and Web of Science databases to select cost-of-illness studies calculating the cost of obesity in a study population aged ≥18 years with obesity, as defined by a body mass index of ≥30 kg/m², for the whole selected country. The time frame for the analysis was January 2011 to September 2016. Results: The included twenty three studies reported a substantial economic burden of obesity in both developed and developing countries. There was considerable heterogeneity in methodological approaches, target populations, study time frames, and perspectives. This prevents an informative comparison between most of the studies. Specifically, there was great variety in the included obesity-related diseases and complications among the studies. Conclusions: There is an urgent need for public health measures to prevent obesity in order to save societal resources. Moreover, international consensus is required on standardized methods to calculate the cost of obesity to improve homogeneity and comparability. This aspect should also be considered when including obesity-related diseases.

          Related collections

          Most cited references68

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: found
          • Article: not found

          Annual medical spending attributable to obesity: payer-and service-specific estimates.

          In 1998 the medical costs of obesity were estimated to be as high as $78.5 billion, with roughly half financed by Medicare and Medicaid. This analysis presents updated estimates of the costs of obesity for the United States across payers (Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurers), in separate categories for inpatient, non-inpatient, and prescription drug spending. We found that the increased prevalence of obesity is responsible for almost $40 billion of increased medical spending through 2006, including $7 billion in Medicare prescription drug costs. We estimate that the medical costs of obesity could have risen to $147 billion per year by 2008.
            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: not found
            • Book: not found

            Obesity preventing and managing the global epidemic

              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: found
              • Article: not found

              The medical care costs of obesity: an instrumental variables approach.

              This paper is the first to use the method of instrumental variables (IV) to estimate the impact of obesity on medical costs in order to address the endogeneity of weight and to reduce the bias from reporting error in weight. Models are estimated using restricted-use data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey for 2000-2005. The IV model, which exploits genetic variation in weight as a natural experiment, yields estimates of the impact of obesity on medical costs that are considerably higher than the estimates reported in the previous literature. For example, obesity is associated with $656 higher annual medical care costs, but the IV results indicate that obesity raises annual medical costs by $2741 (in 2005 dollars). These results imply that the previous literature has underestimated the medical costs of obesity, resulting in underestimates of the economic rationale for government intervention to reduce obesity-related externalities. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Academic Editor
                Journal
                Int J Environ Res Public Health
                Int J Environ Res Public Health
                ijerph
                International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
                MDPI
                1661-7827
                1660-4601
                19 April 2017
                April 2017
                : 14
                : 4
                : 435
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Institute for Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology (IBE), LMU Munich, 81377 Bavaria, Germany
                [2 ]Health Economics Unit, Department of Clinical Sciences, Lund University, 22381 Lund, Sweden; ulf.gerdtham@ 123456med.lu.se (U.-G.G.); sanjib.saha@ 123456med.lu.se (S.S.)
                [3 ]Centre for Primary Health Care Research, Faculty of Medicine, Lund University/Region Skåne, Skåne University Hospital, S-22241 Lund, Skåne, Sweden
                [4 ]Department of Economics, Lund University, S-22363 Lund, Skåne, Sweden
                [5 ]Department of Clinical Sciences, Lund University, Skåne University Hospital, S-20502 Malmö, Skåne, Sweden; peter.nilsson@ 123456med.lu.se
                Author notes
                Article
                ijerph-14-00435
                10.3390/ijerph14040435
                5409636
                28422077
                ad687f65-37e2-4c17-9ea0-e7b3ac66124e
                © 2017 by the authors.

                Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

                History
                : 05 March 2017
                : 16 April 2017
                Categories
                Review

                Public health
                obesity,cost of illness,obesity-related disease,burden of obesity
                Public health
                obesity, cost of illness, obesity-related disease, burden of obesity

                Comments

                Comment on this article