Obesity-linked illnesses to cost India $13bn/year by 2025

MUMBAI: Obesity-related diseases such as heart ailments, diabetes, and cancer will cost India a staggering $13 billion annually by 2025, in the wake of continued increase in childhood obesity, coupled with its financial impact at all ages, according to World Obesity Federation.

The global annual medical cost of treating serious consequences of obesity is expected to reach $1.2 trillion per year by 2025. Despite the increase in child and adolescent obesity, globally more children remain moderately or severely underweight than obese, with 75 million girls moderately or severely underweight in 2016, and 117 million boys, a study published in The Lancet said.

Almost two thirds of the world's children and adolescents who are moderately or severely underweight lived in south Asia. Interestingly, India too, along with a few other countries, faces a twin challenge of under-nutrition and under-weight , along with an alarming rise in obesity. Like, excessive weight gain in childhood and adolescence is associated with a higher risk and earlier onset of chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes, at the other extreme, being underweight has its own share of health problems.

Says Dr Anoop Misra chairman of Delhi-based Fortis centre of excellence for diabetes, metabolic diseases and endocrinology, "Both obesity and malnutrition increase risk for death, albeit due to different causes; former causes heart disease, diabetes and cancers, and latter attrition, infections (e.g. tuberculosis), anemia, and multiple deficiencies. Both coexist in many Indian communities and sometimes within the same families. Further, many malnourished women become pregnant and give birth to underweight babies. These are overfed in childhood, and later have early-onset diabetes and hypertension (Barker Hypothesis). So there is linear association between undernutrition, and early onset diabetes and heart disease, linked by childhood overnutrition".

On World Obesity Day on October 11, World Obesity Federation along with Lancet and the World Health Organization, have urged governments, health service providers, insurers and philanthropic organisations to prioritise investment in tackling the problem. This includes investing in treatments, early intervention to improve the success, and prevention. Investment can help to achieve the 2025 targets set by WHO to halt the rise in obesity, and to achieve a 25% relative reduction in mortality from non-communicable diseases. "We expect to see that child obesity is still rising in low and middle-income countries, with the absolute numbers of overweight children expected to exceed the numbers of undernourished children within the next few years", said Dr Tim Lobstein at the World Obesity Federation.