Description
Introduction
Globally, the rising trend in overweight and obesity has led to a substantial increase of the burden of non-communicable disease across the life course. Estimation of the magnitude of the future disease burden related to high BMI in Kenya could inform priority setting in overweight and obesity prevention and control.
Methods
We used a proportional multistate life table model (Kenya Obesity Model) to estimate the impact of the elimination of exposure to high body mass (BMI >22·5 kg/m2) on health adjusted life years, health adjusted life expectancy, and burden of obesity-related diseases. We modelled the 2019 Kenyan population over their lifetime.
BMI levels were derived from the 2015 Kenya ‘STEPwise approach to Surveillance of NCD risk factors’ survey. We used Kenya-specific data from the Global Burden of Disease 2019 study for age-, sex- and cause-specific incidence, prevalence, and mortality, all-cause mortality and disability rates and the 2019 population data. We modelled 37 diseases.
Findings
Elimination of high BMI could save approximately 83·5 million health-adjusted life years (~ 1.7 HALYs per person) and increase the health-adjusted life expectancy by 2·3 (95% UI 2·0-2·8) years for females and 1·0 (95% UI 0·8-1·1) years for males. Over the first 25 years, over 7·4 million new cases of BMI-related diseases could be avoided and approximately half a million BMI related deaths postponed. The cumulative number of new cases of type 2 diabetes could reduce by approximately 1·6 million, cardiovascular diseases by over 1·3 million, chronic kidney disease by 850,473 and cancer would reduce by 55,624 estimated cases.
Conclusion
The magnitude of the avoidable high BMI-related disease burden in Kenya underscores the need to prioritise prevention and control of overweight and obesity and related NCDs. The Kenya Obesity Model infrastructure can be used in future research work to help set priorities for NCD control.
| Country | Australia |
|---|---|
| Organization | Academic Institution |
| Position | Research Fellow |
| Received a Grant? | No |
