The obesity problem in the age group of 18-24yrs is the same for all despite sex, ethnicity, geographic region, or socioeconomic area characteristics.
A new study has revealed that obesity is the next biggest health problem for people in the age of 18 to 24 in the coming decade of their life compared to adults. It suggested that obesity is turning out to be one of the biggest reasons behind many health conditions. Therefore it says that obesity prevention policies should target this age group.
The study was led by researchers at University College London, the University of Cambridge and Berlin Institute of Health at Charite Universitatsmedizin Berlin. The findings of the research are published in The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology journal. The risk of gaining weight is not only highest in the youngest adult age group but it steadily decreases with age, the study revealed.
The obesity problem in this age group is the same for all despite sex, ethnicity, geographic region, or socioeconomic area characteristics, the study said. Obesity also leads to many other health issues like diabetes, blood pressure, and heart ailments.
What researchers did
The researchers looked at anonymized primary care health records from more than 2 million adults (with more than 9 million measurements of BMI and weight).
The study was conducted in England between 1998 and 2016 to investigate the risk of weight changes at different ages and among different groups.
They found that people aged 18 to 24 were four times more likely to become overweight or develop obesity over the next 10 years than those aged 65 to 74.
Overweight or obese young adults were more likely to move to a higher BMI category than those classed as overweight or with obesity in any other age group.
The authors provide the public an online tool to calculate their risk of weight change over the next 1, 5, and 10 years.
This was based on an individual's current weight and height, age, sex, ethnicity and socioeconomic area characteristics.
People in the 18-24 age group were 4.2 times more likely than people aged 65-74 to transition from normal weight to overweight/obesity.
People aged 18-24 were 4.6 times more likely to transition from the overweight category to obesity and 5.9 times more likely to move from non-severe obesity to severe obesity.
The link between sociodemographic factors such as deprivation and ethnicity and these transitions was less pronounced.
The researchers were surprised to see only a small additional effect of social deprivation on risks of weight gain.
The study found that the risk of the youngest men living in the most deprived areas was 44% compared to 40% in average areas.
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