Living longer with obesity means heavier burden for...(next Schafer said. It was a spillover ...),Health

"This raises other questions, including whether hospitals are effective in the way they deal with long-term obesity."

The researchers also accounted for the role aging plays.

"There is a tricky relationship between age and the duration of obesity because you really can't have a long duration of obesity unless you are older," Schafer said. "We adjusted our findings for age, and we know it's not just age that is contributing to longer hospital stays. Rather living with obesity for years has its own effect."

The second study, which followed 1,023 subjects who experienced a hospitalization that was considered avoidable, appeared in November's Archives of Internal Medicine, published by the American Medical Association. The authors found that obese individuals, ages 25-64, were almost twice as likely to be hospitalized compared to normal-weight subjects. Obese people have the highest likelihood, about 24 percent, of being hospitalized when it could have been avoided.

Appropriate primary care could have prevented these hospitalizations, Ferraro said. However, those who are overweight or obese may not have sought regular care because of embarrassment or other issues related to their weight. This may suggest the need for primary-care providers to be more sensitive to the specific problems obese patients encounter.

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