Health burden and costs of obesity and overweight in Germany

Konnopka, Alexander; Bödemann, M; König, Hans‐Helmut

doi:10.1007/s10198-010-0242-6

Cited by 100 publications

(113 citation statements)

References 23 publications

(27 reference statements)

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“…Several past studies have dealt with the costs of obesity in Europe [13]: seven [14][15][16][17][18][19][20] have focused on the situation in Germany, but employ different methods to assess obesity and thus yield estimations that constitute a large bandwidth. Konnopka et al [14] sum the direct and indirect costs of obesity to €9.9 billion annually. A recent update [15] estimates a total of €16.8 bn.…”

Section: Health Economic Aspects Regarding Obesitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The costs and consequences of obesity in Germany: a new approach from a prevalence and life-cycle perspective

Effertz

Engel²,

Verheyen³

et al. 2015

Eur J Health Econ

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With the steadily growing health burden of obesity in Germany, the measuring and quantification of its costs and relevant economic consequences have become increasingly important. The usual quantifications via previous cost-of-illness approaches mostly have several weaknesses, e.g., applying "indirect methods" by using "population-attributable fractions" to identify parts of costs that can be accrued to obesity, second using highly aggregated data and third often only displaying part of the costs. This article presents a new approach and a new estimation of the cost and consequences of obesity in Germany using claims data from a German health insurance company. A sample of 146,000 individuals was analyzed with both a prevalence and a life-cycle focus on the cost and consequences of obesity. With additional data sets, we calculate the deaths per year due to obesity, the excess costs per year and several intangible consequences usually referred to as "pain and suffering". Our results show that the cost estimations of obesity in Germany so far have been largely underestimated. The annual direct costs of obesity in Germany amount to approximately €29.39 billion and the indirect costs to an additional €33.65 billion. A total of 102,000 subjects die prematurely each year because of obesity, and there is a significant excess of unemployment, long-term nursing care, and pain and suffering due to obesity. From a lifetime perspective, every obese man is equal to an additional burden of €166,911 and each woman of €206,526 for the social security system in Germany. Obesity due to unhealthy eating is thus about to replace tobacco consumption in terms of costs and consequences as the main hazardous lifestyle factor and thus should be more intensively focussed by public health policy.

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Section: Health Economic Aspects Regarding Obesitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The costs and consequences of obesity in Germany: a new approach from a prevalence and life-cycle perspective

Effertz

Engel²,

Verheyen³

et al. 2015

Eur J Health Econ

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“…Dies deutet darauf hin, dass die Kosten der medizinischen Versorgung mit der Bestehensdauer des Übergewichts ansteigen [8]. Dies ist insofern von Bedeutung, als bei einem Großteil der betroffenen Kinder Überge-wicht und Adipositas auch im Erwachsenenalter fortbestehen [5] und die häu-figsten Begleit-und Folgeerkrankungen (zum Beispiel Typ-2-Diabetes, Bluthochdruck, Herzinfarkt) im Erwachsenenalter mit erheblichen direkten [24,25,26,27] und indirekten [28,29,30] Kosten einhergehen. So wurden die dem Übergewicht und der Adipositas attributablen Gesamtkosten für Deutschland im Jahr 2002 in einer aktuellen Studie [25] auf 9873 Milliarden Euro geschätzt (davon entfielen 4854 Milliarden Euro auf direkte und 5019 Milliarden Euro auf indirekte Kosten).…”

Section: Schlussfolgerungenunclassified

Prävention und Therapie von Übergewicht und Adipositas im Kindes- und Jugendalter aus gesundheitsökonomischer Sicht

König

Lehnert

Riedel‐Heller

et al. 2011

Bundesgesundheitsbl.

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This article provides an overview of the costs associated with overweight and obesity in children and adolescents, and of the cost effectiveness of preventive and therapeutic interventions. First, the results of cost-of-illness studies from the international literature are presented. These studies show ambiguous results, but indicate moderate excess costs due to obesity for this age group. Subsequently, this paper describes the methods that can be used to analyze the cost effectiveness of preventive and therapeutic interventions. Problems arise from the necessity to estimate long-term effects on costs and health consequences of multiple, associated diseases. A number of economic evaluations of preventive and therapeutic interventions published in the scientific literature have reported favorable cost effectiveness. In order to increase the efficiency of health care, more cost-effective services for overweight and obesity should be developed and used.

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“…Obesity is an important cause of morbidity, disability and premature death and increases the risk for a wide range of chronic diseases (WHO 2009, Antonanzas and Rodriguez 2010, Konnopka et al 2011. In June 2013, the the American Medical Association voted to classify obesity as a disease in the hopes that by recognizing obesity as a disease it will help change the way the medical community tackles this complex health issue.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring obesity in the absence of a gold standard

O’Neill

2015

Economics & Human Biology

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Measuring Obesity in the Absence of a Gold Standard * Reliable measures of body composition are essential in order to develop effective policies to tackle the costs of obesity. To date the lack of an acceptable gold-standard for measuring fatness has made it difficult to evaluate alternative measures of obesity. In this paper we draw on work in other areas of epidemiology and use latent class analysis to evaluate alternative measures of obesity in the absence of a gold standard. Using data from a representative sample of US adults we show that while measures based on Body Mass Index and Bioelectrical Impedance Analysis appear to misclassify large numbers of individuals, this is not the case for classification based on waist circumference. The error rates associated with waist circumference are of the order of 3% for most of our samples compared to error rates as high as 40-50% with the other measures. These results have implications for racial differences in obesity. Our estimated true prevalence rates imply that the obesity rate among black women is substantially higher than among white women. However, the opposite is true for men, with the black men having a significantly lower obesity rate among black men. The fact that neither the BMI nor the BIA based measures of obesity are capable of capturing both these features highlights the dangers associated with measuring obesity and the potential costly policy mistakes that may arise from arbitrarily adopting a single measure as a gold standard. JEL Classification:I18, C38

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Health burden and costs of obesity and overweight in Germany

Cited by 100 publications

References 23 publications

The costs and consequences of obesity in Germany: a new approach from a prevalence and life-cycle perspective

The costs and consequences of obesity in Germany: a new approach from a prevalence and life-cycle perspective

Prävention und Therapie von Übergewicht und Adipositas im Kindes- und Jugendalter aus gesundheitsökonomischer Sicht

Measuring obesity in the absence of a gold standard

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