Posts Tagged ‘BMI’

Everyone seems to think they know obesity when they see it. In the popular imagination this is easy. But it turns out that thinking it’s easy makes diagnosing obesity hard. BMI was the old, seemingly easy way for an objective diagnosis. Is the number over 30? Then the diagnosis was obesity. Under 30? Nope. Now, […]

Spending yesterday with some of the top experts in obesity, health policy, and health systems reminded us of something essential that often escapes attention. The static measure of BMI cannot possibly be adequate for assessing the chronic disease of obesity. What brought this thought to mind was an expert in health benefit design who said: […]

Everyone seems to know it. We need something better than BMI to serve as a clinical index for the diagnosis of obesity. But getting them to move on is like herding millions of cats. Agreement on the substitute and movement toward it is hard to find. In Search of an Alternative Writing on Medscape, obesity […]

This week has been a flood of news from the EASD meeting in Vienna. Yesterday, the big news was an impressive win for kids 10-17 with type 2 diabetes in a study of tirzepatide. Researchers presented the SURPASS-PEDS trial and simultaneously published it in Lancet. At the end of the 30-week trial, tirzepatide in two […]

The magical Mirror of Erised can drive people mad by showing them their deepest desires. Judging by the flood of papers in recent days, it seems that one such desire is to find consensus for a clinical definition of obesity. In the past week alone, three such publications have crossed our screens. In the past […]

Half a year has passed since the Lancet Commission on Clinical Obesity published its attempt to build a global consensus around a definition for obesity that distinguishes clinically significant obesity from preclinical obesity. Three new publications in Annals of Internal Medicine make it clear that this task is incomplete. Despite heroic efforts, consensus for distinguishing […]

It is really easy to beat up on the lowly BMI. The Lancet Commission on clinical obesity gently kicked it to the curb by saying BMI “can both overestimate and underestimate adiposity” and thus declared its obsolescence as a singular measure for excess adiposity. “Excess adiposity should be confirmed by either direct measurement of body […]

Obesity is linked to many common diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, fatty liver disease and knee osteoarthritis. Obesity is currently defined using a person’s body mass index, or BMI. This is calculated as weight (in kilograms) divided by the square of height (in metres). In people of European descent, the BMI for […]

Drug development for obesity may well be in a golden age. In large part, this is because the scientific understanding of obesity has grown exponentially in the past two decades. Unfortunately, little or none of that is reflected in new draft guidance from FDA, issued yesterday for public comment, on developing the next generation of […]

The scientific understanding of obesity is progressing with impressive speed. But the translation of scientific insight into clinical benefits is slow by comparison. Most clinicians (along with the public) are stuck. We’re encumbered by an inadequate definition of obesity, overreliance on BMI, and medical groupthink. Straining for a Clinical Definition In an excellent essay for […]