Obesity is a global pandemic, currently affecting around 150 million people in Europe and 650 million people worldwide. The pandemic rise in obesity has increased the current debate over its classification as a disease. Contrary to just being a medical condition or risk factor for other diseases, obesity is a complex disease of multifaceted etiology, with its own disabling capacities, pathophysiologies and comorbidities. Initial weight gain is related to behavioral and environmental factors acting on a biological (mainly genetic) predisposition. The evolution of the disease is characterized by the development of an inflammatory organ disease that involves the adipocytes and other adipose tissue components. These alterations lead to several clinical complications and to a progressive resistance to diet effects.
Some of the complications of obesity include cardiovascular disease, non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus, obstructive pulmonary disease, arthritis and cancer. Given the excess mortality, substantial morbidity and the economic cost of obesity, this is a disease that needs serious attention by the medical community.
In this talk, we explain the importance of accepting obesity as a multifactorial disease, this being key to its treatment strategy and the development of widespread interventions. For this, he also talks about the SOPHIA (Stratification of Obesity Phenotypes to Optimize Future Therapy) project, whose aim is delivering evidence and shared value analysis to optimize the future treatment of obesity and predictors for risk and response. SOPHIA will therefore identify and characterise clinically-meaningful subpopulations of patients with obesity using the right treatment for the right people at the right time. The research group will use this knowledge to change how the world talks about obesity based on new understanding and a new vocabulary. It all starts with obesity as a chronic disease, not something people choose to live with.
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