ArticleInternational journal of environmental research and public health2017
The Non-Linear Relationship between BMI and Health Care Costs and the Resulting Cost Fraction Attributable to Obesity.
Article in International journal of environmental research and public health, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Obesity in Late Adolescence and Healthcare Costs in Young to Mid-Adulthood.Diabetes, obesity & metabolism · 2026Article
- Low-, moderate-, and high-risk obesity in association with cost drivers, costs over the lifecycle, and life expectancy.BMC public health · 2024Article
- The healthcare costs of increased body mass index-evidence from The Trøndelag Health Study.Health economics review · 2024Article
- Systematic preoperative approach for bariatric surgery, perioperative results, and economic impact.Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
- Impact of preoperative weight loss achieved by gastric balloon on peri- and postoperative outcomes of bariatric surgery in super-obese patients: a retrospective matched-pair analysis.Langenbeck's archives of surgery · 2022Article
- Body mass index and healthcare costs: using genetic variants from the HUNT study as instrumental variables.BMC health services research · 2022Article
- Costs and where to find them: identifying unit costs for health economic evaluations of diabetes in France, Germany and Italy.The European journal of health economics : HEPAC : health economics in prevention and care · 2020Review
- Disparities in Diffuse Cortical White Matter Integrity Between Socioeconomic Groups.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2019Article
- [Bariatric surgery: Expectations and therapeutic goals-a contradiction?]Der Chirurg; Zeitschrift fur alle Gebiete der operativen Medizen · 2018Review
- Liquid Sucrose Consumption Promotes Obesity and Impairs Glucose Tolerance Without Altering Circulating Insulin Levels.Obesity (Silver Spring, Md.) · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
This study aims to analyse the non-linear relationship between Body Mass Index (BMI) and direct health care costs, and to quantify the resulting cost fraction attributable to obesity in Germany. Five cross-sectional surveys of cohort studies in southern Germany were pooled, resulting in data of 6757 individuals (31-96 years old). Self-reported information on health care utilisation was used to estimate direct health care costs for the year 2011. The relationship between measured BMI and annual costs was analysed using generalised additive models, and the cost fraction attributable to obesity was calculated. We found a non-linear association of BMI and health care costs with a continuously increasing slope for increasing BMI without any clear threshold. Under the consideration of the non-linear BMI-cost relationship, a shift in the BMI distribution so that the BMI of each individual is lowered by one point is associated with a 2.1% reduction of mean direct costs in the population. If obesity was eliminated, and the BMI of all obese individuals were lowered to 29.9 kg/m², this would reduce the mean direct costs by 4.0% in the population. Results show a non-linear relationship between BMI and health care costs, with very high costs for a few individuals with high BMI. This indicates that population-based interventions in combination with selective measures for very obese individuals might be the preferred strategy.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.