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Date Posted: 08:33:40 02/12/04 Thu
Author: J.R.Smith, c.f.t. ISSA
Subject: Obesity Epidemic Means More Are Disabled

Someone made this available to me so I thought I would pass it on to you. Hopefully this will help.
J.R.Smith, c.f.t. ISSA

Obesity Epidemic Means More Are Disabled

Thursday, January 8, 2004



WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. obesity epidemic may be causing another, quieter epidemic of disability, including back trouble and diabetes, health experts reported on Thursday.

Younger Americans are becoming disabled more often, many with back pain, according to the study, published in the journal Health Affairs. Although there was no direct proof, the researcher believed obesity was mostly to blame.

"Obesity is the only trend that is commensurate in size with what we found happening with disability," said Darius Lakdawalla, an economist at the RAND research institute who helped write the study.

"It's the only suspect. We found that there is something going on with people's health and that the increase is not just a case of people dropping out of the workforce and going on the public dole," the economist said.

More than 60 percent of Americans are overweight or obese. In 2000, 38.8 million Americans or 31 percent of the adult population were classified as obese, meaning their health was seriously at risk.

Obese people are more likely to suffer heart attacks, strokes, several forms of cancer and less deadly disability such as backache.

Lakdawalla and colleagues at RAND and at Stanford University in California analyzed data from the National Health Interview Survey, an annual nationwide government survey of about 36,000 households.

They looked for disability trends among people ages 18 to 69 between 1984 and 2000. They found substantial growth in reported disability rates among those under 50 years but not among the elderly.

Among those 50 to 59 years, disability rose only among those who were obese, the study found.

"Obesity accounts for about half the increased disability among those ages 18 to 29," they wrote in their report. Much of the time, diabetes and back pain was to blame and the researchers said the links with obesity were clear.

This will end up costing money, the researchers said.

"People who are disabled generally use a lot more medical services so in the long run this trend could add a lot of costs to the nation's health care bill," said Dana Goldman, director of health economics at RAND Health, who worked on the study.

The federal government reported, also on Thursday in Health Affairs, that the country's health spending bill rose to $1.6 trillion in 2002.

In addition to obesity, some of the increase in disability rates may be explained by disability insurance incentives and new medical technology that saves the lives of people who would have died even a few years ago, the researchers said.

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