Most adults in the U.S. will be overweight or obese by 2030, with related health care spending projected to be as much as $956.9 billion, according to researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Their results are published in the July 2008 online issue of Obesity.

“National survey data show that the prevalence of overweight and obese adults in the U.S. has increased steadily over the past three decades,” said Youfa Wang, MD, PhD, lead author of the study and associate professor with the Bloomberg School’s Center for Human Nutrition. “If these trends continue, more than 86 percent of adults will be overweight or obese by 2030 with approximately 96 percent of non-Hispanic black women and 91 percent of Mexican-American men affected. This would result in 1 of every 6 health care dollars spent in total direct health care costs paying for overweight and obesity-related costs.”

“The health care costs attributable to obesity and overweight are expected to more than double every decade. This would account for 15 to 17 percent of total health care costs spent,” Wang says. “Due to the assumptions we made and the limitations of the available data, these figures are likely an underestimation of the true financial impact.”

Being obese can increase the risk of Alzheimer’s Disease by as much as 80 per cent, according to a study in the May issue of Obesity Reviews. Researchers carried out a detailed review of 10 international studies published since 1995, covering just over 37,000 people, including 2,534 with various forms of dementia. Subjects were aged between 40 and 80 years when the studies started, with follow-up periods ranging from three to 36 years.

“Obesity was more likely to be a risk factor for women when it came to developing Alzheimer’s Disease and for men when it came to vascular dementia,” said Dr. Youfa Wang, Associate Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

In a new study reported at an American Stroke Association conference, rising obesity rates have been linked to more strokes among middle-aged women.

The researchers concluded that although key traditional risk factors, such as high blood pressure, may not be higher today than in the ’90s, obesity is on the increase. “Abdominal obesity is a known predictor of stroke in women and may be a key factor in the midlife stroke surge,” the researchers said. “This study highlights the need to intensify efforts in curbing the obesity epidemic in the United States.”

As many as 50 percent of overweight men and women with high blood pressure may have hypertension as a result of being overweight, researchers reported at the American Heart Association’s 61st Annual Fall Conference of the Council for High Blood Pressure Research.

Researchers in Italy found that about 50 percent of overweight, hypertensive adults, ranging in age from 29 to 65 years, achieved normal body weight and blood pressure after six months of treatment with a reduced-calorie diet.

“This is important because it means that in these patients with elevated blood pressure who were overweight, the blood pressure was not a form of essential hypertension but was hypertension secondary to body weight,” said Roberto Fogari, M.D., lead investigator of the study and professor of medicine at the University of Pavia, Italy.

According to researchers at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, money motivates people to slim down. Overweight employees who were paid a small amount lost more weight than those who weren’t compensated for their efforts, according to one of the first studies to examine such a strategy at workplaces.

“Lots of companies are experimenting with rewarding people for weight loss, and this study provides evidence that paying people to lose weight works,” says Eric Finkelstein, a health economist with RTI International, a non-profit research organization in Research Triangle Park, N.C.

According to a new study in Economic Inquiry, an individual’s body weight depends not just on physiology and economic circumstances, but also on average body weight of the population at large. The findings complement those of a recent, high profile study that found direct evidence of social contagion of obesity within social networks.

“Behavior governing weight depends not just on health considerations but also on the desire to appear normal and attractive,” say authors Mary Burke and Frank Heiland. As a result, any change that causes average weight to increase, such as a decline in food prices, will lead to additional weight increases because the weight level considered “normal” will rise.

According to researchers at Johns Hopkins University, US obesity prevalence increased from 13 to 32 percent between the 1960s and 2004. The prevalence of obesity has increased at an average rate of 0.3 to 0.8 percentage points across different sociodemographic groups over the past three decades.

“Obesity is a public health crisis. If the rate of obesity and overweight continues at this pace, by 2015, 75 percent of adults and nearly 24 percent of U.S. children and adolescents will be overweight or obese,” said Youfa Wang, MD, PhD, lead author of the study.

Gaining too much weight can be as bad for an employer’s bottom line as it is for a person’s waistline.

A Duke University Medical Center analysis found that obese workers filed twice the number of workers’ compensation claims, had seven times higher medical costs from those claims and lost 13 times more days of work from work injury or work illness than did nonobese workers.

“Given the strong link between obesity and workers’ compensation costs, maintaining healthy weight is not only important to workers but should also be a high priority for employers,” said Truls Ostbye, MD, PhD., professor of community and family medicine. “Work-based programs designed to target healthful eating and physical activity should be developed and then evaluated as part of a strategy to make all workplaces healthier and safer.”

For overweight and obese individuals, the incidence of asthma increases by 50 percent, as compared to those of normal weight, according to a meta-analysis of seven studies on severe asthma involving 333,102 patients.

This new study appears in the April 2007 issue of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

“If significant weight loss could be achieved in the population of overweight and obese individuals, it could be estimated that the number of new asthma cases in United States adults might fall by as much as 250,000 per year,” said Dr. Rand Sutherland, one of the authors of the study.

If both partners in a couple are overweight or obese, they are more likely to have to wait longer before successfully conceiving a child, according to new research published online in Europe’s leading reproductive medicine journal, Human Reproduction.

Researchers in Denmark studied 47,835 Danish couples between 1996 and 2002 and found that if both partners were obese the chances of the couple having to wait for more than a year before the woman became pregnant were nearly three times higher than for a normal weight couple.