Study leader Pieter van Baal, an economist at the Netherlands' National Institute for Public Health and the Environment and colleagues, estimated the annual and lifetime medical costs attributable to obesity and compared those to similar costs attributable to smoking.
Though obesity prevention leads to a decrease in costs of obesity-related diseases, but this is offset by cost increases from diseases unrelated to obesity in life-years gained, the study says.
The authors created a model to simulate lifetime health costs for three groups of 1,000 people: the "healthy-living" group (mostly thin and non smokers). The Cost of illness (COI) data from The Netherlands for 2003 was used to estimate health-care expenditure.
In a paper published online Monday in the Public Library of Science Medicine journal, Dutch researchers found that at older ages, smokers incurred higher costs. Because of differences in life expectancy, however, lifetime health expenditure was highest among healthy-living people and lowest for smokers.
The study found that adult people (age 20 to 56 years) who are thin and healthy have to spend more money in their treatment as compared to obese or smokers. It was also found that since the smokers and the obese people died sooner than the healthy group, it cost less to treat them in the long run.
The study model predicted that until the age of 56, yearly health costs were highest for obese people and lowest for healthy-living people. At older ages, the highest yearly costs were incurred by the smoking group. However, the total lifetime health spending was greatest for the healthy-living people, lowest for the smokers, and intermediate for the obese people.
The "obese" group consisted of never-smoking people with a Body Mass Index (BMI) of more than 30; the "healthy-living" group consisted of never-smoking people with a healthy weight; the "smoking" group consisted of lifetime smokers with a healthy weight.
The results debunk the common notion that that preventing obesity will save health systems worldwide millions of dollars. One-third of all American adults are now classified as obese and recent forecasts suggest that by 2025 half of American adults will be obese. The study was funded by the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sports.
