Obesity: The gateway to ill health - An EASO position statement on a rising public health, clinical and scientific challenge in Europe

摘要

Although obesity was only introduced in the 1950s into the International Classificationof Diseases (currently ICD-10 code E66, though EASO thinks that this categorization requiresrevision and is committed to propose novel criteria for ICD-11), it had already reachedepidemic proportions by the end of the century, becoming one of the leading causes of deathand disability worldwide. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) the prevalenceof obesity has tripled since the 1980s in many countries of the WHO European Region, withoverweight and obesity affecting 50% of the population in the majority of European countries[1] . In 2008, 1.5 billion adults, 20 years and older, were overweight with an estimated 500million adults worldwide being obese (over 200 million men and nearly 300 million women);approximately 65% of the world’s population inhabit countries where overweight and obesitykill more people than underweight [2, 3] . The figures of affected individuals rage on unabated,and more than 40 million children under the age of 5 years were overweight in 2010 [3] .