Prevalence of Obesity and Severe Obesity among Professionally Active Adult Population in Poland and Its Strong Relationship with Cardiovascular Co-Morbidities-POL-O-CARIA 2016-2020 Study

Abstract

For several decades, a steady increase in the percentage of overweight and obese people has been observed all over the world. There are many studies available in the literature emphasizing the relationship of overweight and obesity with the occurrence of other diseases. The aim of this study is to characterize the prevalence of obesity and severe obesity, as well as their changes over time, among professionally active adults who underwent occupational medicine examinations in Poland in 2016−2020, for the POL-O-CARIA 2016−2020 study. In total, the results of 1,450,455 initial, control and periodic visits as part of the occupational medicine certificate were analyzed. Statistical calculations were performed with the use of IBM SPSS Statistics 25. In both groups (men/women), a significant decrease was observed every year for people who had normal body weight. In addition, the tendency to increase in people with I and III degrees of obesity was more strongly observed in the male group. A significant relationship was also observed between BMI categories and the occurrence of all analyzed comorbidities: hypertension, type 2 diabetes, lipid disorders and coronary artery disease (chi2 (70) = 12,228.11; p < 0.001). Detailed results showed that in the group of patients diagnosed with hypertension or lipid disorders, significant differences were observed between all groups; it turned out that as the BMI level increased (I, I, III), there was an increase in the percentage of occurrence of hypertension (38.1%, 41% and 45.3%, respectively) and type 2 diabetes (3.2%, 4.6% and 5.8%, respectively) (p < 0.001). Our analysis indicates that the prevalence of adult obesity and severe obesity will continue to increase nationwide, with an accompanying large increase in comorbidities.

Keywords: BMI index; cardiovascular diseases; obesity; professionally active adult population.

Figure A1

The number of visits analyzed versus the year of measurement.

Figure A2

Sex distribution depending on the year of measurement.

Figure A3

Patient age distribution versus the year of measurement.

Figure 1

Average age depending on the BMI category (in the figure, all groups are statistically significantly different, at least at the p < 0.001 level; due to the number of groups compared, results for differences are not shown in the figure).

Figure 2

Average number of months for the issued medical certificate depending on the BMI category (in the figure, all groups are statistically significantly different, at least at the p < 0.05 level; due to the number of groups compared, results for differences are not shown in the figure).

Figure 3

Percentage of people declaring smoking depending on the BMI category (due to the number of groups compared, results for differences are not shown in the figure).