Obesity till now is being classified on the basis of body measurements arrived at taking in to account the BMI and the waist size of the individuals. However this system of classifying obese individuals has not helped much especially to the medical fraternity for treating diverse people differently. It is so mainly because of the system followed presently is based on characteristics of a population of individuals rather than characteristics of the each individual.
The joint team of US and Canadian researchers have proposed to classify obesity differently that would be helpful for doctors in proper assessment and thus advising correct treatment for the various overweight patients.
The team was led by obesity expert Dr. Arya Sharma from University of Alberta, who said, “We know that obesity can lead to a whole host of health problems, including heart disease, diabetes, cancer, kidney disease, fatty liver disease, osteoarthritis, sleep apnea and depression. But increased body fat alone doesn’t necessarily imply or reliably predict these health problems,” and added “Two patients with the same BMI or waist size can have wildly different health issues that require different treatment approaches; these anthropometric measurements should be complemented by a clinical staging system that provides a meaningful framework for diagnosing and managing obesity.”
The team included researchers from Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, name the staging system as ‘The Edmonton Obesity Staging System’. The proposed system categorizes obesity in five stages i.e. Stage – 0 to Stage – 4.
- The overweight people with no obesity related heath symptoms are placed in Stage – 0
- while Stage – 4 includes overweight people with most severe obesity related health issues.
The doctors just need to go through the medical records and history of the patients and perform some routine checks to find out blood sugar and cholesterol level, before classifying the patients in one of the stages of obesity. Once the obesity stage is identified accordingly the suggested treatment is administered on the patients.
"Our system was developed to provide health practitioners with a simplified approach to identifying the extent of obesity-related illness and guide managing obese patients," explains Sharma and added, "It moves beyond the simple categorization of patients based on physical measurements, and brings the severity of risk factors and related diseases into the equation to more accurately guide individualized treatment and assess outcomes. This is something that is lacking under today’s common categorization approaches."
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