Living longer with obesity means heavier burden for...(only such as whether obese people are mo...),Health

Date:12/10/2007

only, such as whether obese people are more likely to go to the hospital in the course of a year," said Schafer, who is in his third year of the dual-title doctoral program in sociology and gerontology. "We wanted to broaden the scope and look at people's hospitalization experience over time as well as their weight history. Examining body weight at only one point in their life doesn't paint a complete picture of the problem."

The studies' findings suggest that obesity must be addressed at a younger age because the longer a person lives with the disease, the greater the consequences. More than 60 percent of the American population is considered overweight or obese based on the body mass index, which is a formula determined by height and weight. Obesity can lead to chronic conditions, such as heart disease, hypertension and Type 2 diabetes, that can affect the quality of life or lead to morbidity.

Ferraro and Schafer found these obesity complications often were the reasons people were hospitalized. Once in the hospital, however, these illnesses alone were not sufficient to explain the amount of time people were staying, Ferraro said.

This month's study shows that people who lived longer as obese stayed in the hospital from a half to one day more than people of average weight. Obesity directly leads to longer stays because of more complicated care or surgery and because obesity can make it harder to use traditional clinical health assessments and measurements, Schafer said.

"Many surgical procedures become more difficult with a lot of excess fat," he said.

This study examined 20 years of data for 4,574 people ages 44-71 who experienced a total of 12,380 hospitalizations. Routine admissions for childbirth were excluded, as were nursing home admissions.

"One of the surprising findings is that, as we followed people over consecutive hospitalizations, we found that the length of one stay was related to the length of the
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Contact: Amy Patterson Neubert apatterson@purdue.edu 765-494-9723 Purdue University   Source:Eurekalert

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