Gender and age differences
The study involved over 14,500 obese patients in eleven countries, followed to understand perceptions, attitudes, behaviors and obstacles in the treatment of obesity; The results indicate, first of all, that early intervention would always be urgent, because obese people under the age of twenty have a more serious disease and in almost half of the cases they think they cannot overcome their problems, resigning themselves to a life in which the excess weight affects them very much. The research also points out that there is a consistent gender difference in obesity: in men, for example, cardiometabolic complications are more likely, present in 10 percent of patients versus 4 percent of women, in females twice the incidence of anxiety and depression (28 percent, versus 14 percent among men). It is women who try to lose weight more often, by all means (almost five attempts on average against three of the males), but 75 percent regain weight after six months against half of the men.
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Disease underestimated
However, an element that unites both sexes is the underestimation of obesity: the weight has been underestimated by everyone, at all ages, so much so that even 25 percent of the most severely obese (and as many as 62 percent of the mildest) are defined only “overweight”. Too many think that it is not a disease, or in any case a serious problem, and as Paolo Sbraccia, vice president of Italian Barometer Diabetes Observatory Foundation points out (IBDO) and lecturer of internal medicine at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, Obesity must be fully recognized as a disease, but still underestimated. 13 percent of severely obese people consider themselves to be normal weight, but a person who does not consider themselves obese will never seek help: the health system must identify these patients and make them understand that it is a disease, to be recognized and treated. Also because obesity is now a sort of pandemic: one in ten Italians obese and the road to obesity begins at an early age, given that 45 percent of children and teenagers have extra pounds. To provide information and talk about weight disorders through cinema, the fourth edition of the Filmdipeso Short Film Festival is back on 18 and 19 September (info on the website https://www.filmdipeso.it/): about twenty films that deal with the relationship with food and weight are competing with each other, but they are above all an opportunity to talk about an increasingly central theme of health.
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20 September 2020 (change September 20, 2020 | 19:05)
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