One in eight adults obese - global survey

PARIS -- Over one in eight adults are now obese -- a ratio that has more than doubled since 1975 and will swell to one in five by 2025, a major survey reported Friday.

Of about five billion adults alive in 2014, 641 million were obese, the data showed -- and projected the number will balloon past 1.1 billion in just nine years.

The research warned of a looming crisis of "severe obesity" and disease brought on by high-fat, high-sugar diets causing blood pressure and cholesterol to rise.

"There will be health consequences of magnitudes that we do not know," author Majid Ezzati of Imperial College London told AFP.

The survey, published in The Lancet medical journal, claimed to be the most comprehensive of its kind conducted to date.

People are divided into healthy or unhealthy weight categories based on a universally-adopted measure dubbed Body Mass Index -- a ratio of weight-to-height squared.

A healthy BMI ranges from 18.5 to 24.9.

One is considered underweight below 18.5, overweight from 25 up, and obese from 30 -- when the risk of diabetes, stroke, heart disease and some cancers escalates massively.

With a BMI of 35, one is categorized as severely obese, and from 40 upward as morbidly so.

Among men globally, obesity tripled from 3.2 percent of the population in 1975 to 10.8 percent in 2014 (some 266 million), and among women from 6.4 percent to 14.9 percent (375 million), said the survey -- 12.9 percent combined.

This was equivalent to the average adult, 18 and older, being 1.5 kilos (3.3 pounds) heavier every decade.

"If the rate of obesity continues at this pace, by 2025 roughly a fifth of men (18 percent) and women (21 percent) will be obese," according to a statement by The Lancet.

More than six percent of men and nine percent of women will be severely obese.

Weighty flip-flop

The ratio of underweight people in the world declined at a slower rate than obesity grew, said the authors -- from about 13.8 percent in 1975 to 8.8 percent for men, and 14.6 percent to 9.7 percent for women.

"Over the past 40 years, we have changed from a world in which underweight prevalence was more than double that of obesity, to one in which more people are obese than underweight," said Ezzati.

At current rates, more women will be severely obese (a BMI of 35 or more) than underweight by 2025, and the world will miss its stated target of halting obesity at 2010 levels.

In 2014, the world's fattest people lived in the island nations of Polynesia and Micronesia, where 38 percent of men and more than half of women were obese, said the study.

Nearly a fifth of the world's obese adults (118 million) lived in six high-income countries -- the United States, Britain, Ireland, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

The US was home to one in four severely obese men and almost one in five severely obese women in the world.

Surgery as a solution? 

At the other extreme, the paper said, Timor-Leste, Ethiopia and Eritrea had the lowest BMI numbers in the world, with averages as low as 20.1

More than a fifth of men in India, Bangladesh, Timor-Leste, Afghanistan, Eritrea and Ethiopia, and a quarter of women in Bangladesh and India, were underweight.

"The global focus on the obesity epidemic has largely overshadowed the persistence of underweight in some countries," the research paper said.

"To address this problem will require social and food policies that enhance food security in poor households, but also avoid overconsumption of processed carbohydrates and other unhealthy foods."

Like being underweight, severe and morbid obesity has many health risks.

"We can deal with some of these, like higher cholesterol or blood pressure, through medicines," said Ezzati.

"But for many others, including diabetes, we don't have effective treatment."

The paper says stomach-shrinking bariatric surgery may become the "most effective intervention for weight loss and disease prevention" as waistlines continue expanding.

The data was compiled from 1,698 studies involving 19.2 million adults from 186 countries which are home to 99 percent of the world's population.

Unlike earlier research, studies were only included if the participants' height and weight had been measured -- not self-reported.

The data did not include statistics on children and teenagers.

source: interaksyon.com

New surgical knife can instantly detect cancer

LONDON  — Surgeons may have a new way to smoke out cancer.

An experimental surgical knife can help surgeons make sure they've removed all the cancerous tissue, doctors reported Wednesday. Surgeons typically use knives that heat tissue as they cut, producing a sharp-smelling smoke. The new knife analyzes the smoke and can instantly signal whether the tissue is cancerous or healthy.

Now surgeons have to send the tissue to a lab and wait for the results.

Dr. Zoltan Takats of Imperial College London suspected the smoke produced during cancer surgery might contain some important cancer clues. So he designed a "smart" knife hooked up to a refrigerator-sized mass spectrometry device on wheels that analyzes the smoke from cauterizing tissue.

The smoke picked up by the smart knife is compared to a library of smoke "signatures" from cancerous and non-cancerous tissues. Information appears on a monitor: green means the tissue is healthy, red means cancerous and yellow means unidentifiable.

To make sure they've removed the tumor, surgeons now send samples to a laboratory while the patient remains on the operating table. It can take about 30 minutes to get an answer in the best hospitals, but even then doctors cannot be entirely sure, so they often remove a bit more tissue than they think is strictly necessary.


If some cancerous cells remain, patients may need to have another surgery or undergo chemotherapy or radiation treatment.

"(The new knife) looks fabulous," said Dr. Emma King, a head and neck cancer surgeon at Cancer Research U.K., who was not connected to the project. The smoke contains broken-up bits of tumor tissue and "it makes sense to look at it more carefully," she said.

The new knife and its accompanying machines were made for about £250,000 ($380,000) but scientists said the price tag would likely drop if the technology is commercialized.

The most common treatment for cancers involving solid tumors is removing them in surgery. In the U.K., one in five breast cancer patients who have surgery will need further operations to get rid of the tumor entirely.

Scientists tested the new knife at three hospitals between 2010 and 2012. Tissue samples were taken from 302 patients to create a database of which kinds of smoke contained cancers, including those of the brain, breast, colon, liver, lung and stomach.

That was then used to analyze tumors from 91 patients; the smart knife correctly spotted cancer in every case. The study was published Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine. The research was paid for by groups including Imperial College London and the Hungarian government.

At a demonstration in London on Wednesday, doctors used the new knife — which resembles a fat white pen — to slice into slabs of pig's liver. Within minutes, the room was filled with an acrid-smelling smoke comparable to the fumes that would be produced during surgery on a human patient.

Takats said the knife would eventually be submitted for regulatory approval but that more studies were planned. He added the knife could also be used for other things like identifying tissues with bad blood supply and identifying the types of bacteria present.

Some experts said the technology could help eliminate the guesswork for doctors operating on cancer patients. "Brain cancers are notorious for infiltrating into healthy brain tissue beyond what's visible to the surgeon," said Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society. "If this can definitively tell doctors whether they've removed all the cancerous tissue, it would be very valuable," he said.

Still, Lichtenfeld said more trials were needed to prove the new knife would actually make a significant difference to patients. Early enthusiasm for new technologies hasn't always panned out, he said, citing the recent popularity of robotic surgery as an example.

"It expanded very rapidly but is now hitting some bumps along the road," he said.

Lichtenfeld said it's unclear whether more widespread use of the smart knife will actually help patients live longer and said studies should also look into whether the tool cuts down on patient's surgery times, their blood loss and rate of wound infections.

"This is a fascinating science and we need to adopt any technology that works to save patients," Lichtenfeld said. "But first we have to be sure that it works."

source: philstar.com