Biography
Biography: Yasser Yaghi
Abstract
Introduction: Obesity is a major health problem with serious sequences. There is little evidence on the development and growth of obesity among Lebanese women. This paper will describe 25 years’ changes in BMI and weight among Lebanese postmenopausal women.
Subjects and methods: Data was collected from 12492 ambulatory Lebanese postmenopausal women attended outpatient clinic in one hospital between July 1997 and December 2021 and were subjected to osteodensitometry study. Gender, birthdate, height, weight and BMI were recorded in all patients. Patients on kidney dialysis and on chemotherapy, radiotherapy treatment were excluded.
Result: The mean age of the 12492 women was 60.63 (SD 11.744) and the mean BMI was 30.09 (SD 5.780) and the average (weight) was 72.24 (SD 14.165) It was particularly notable that both BMI and weight were levelling off over 25 year of the survey.
Conclusion: This epidemiological survey provides a national data addressing prevalence of obesity over 25 years in Lebanese women. The prevalence of overweight was present over the years of this survey and our review indicates a clear tendency towards stabilization of the overweight epidemic among post-menopausal Lebanese women.
This raises a question if BMI is still a useful indicator of overall obesity or it’s a poor tool for defining the health of an individual. Or that it indicates a clear tendency towards stabilization of the obesity epidemic among postmenopausal women which could be the result of mass media work focused on promoting better food habits or it’s a consequence of the lower socioeconomic status of subjects studied. Further studies are needed to examine socioeconomic factor influencing BMI and if TBF and % BF would be a more accurate measure of obesity which directly calculates a person’s relative body composition without regard to height and weight.