All About The 3rd ‘M’

Regular readers will be quite familiar with the 4Ms of obesity (which incidentally feature quite strongly in the Obesity Network 5As of Obesity Management™).

These are the four domains that need to be explored in every assessment for obesity and stand for Mental, Mechanical, Metabolic, and Monetary health.

Last week, I co-hosted the International Hot Topics Conference on Obesity and Mental Health, which was all about the 1st M.

This week, I am attending a conference that is all (and only about) the 3rd M, namely the Metabolic complications of obesity.

As these are largely related to the presence of visceral and ‘ectopic’ fat, the conference is aptly named the International Congress on Abdominal Obesity (ICAO), and is currently being held in Quebec City.

Despite this rather mono-dimensional view of obesity, ICAO nevertheless covers some of the most important complications of this condition – everything from diabetes and dyslipidemia to hypertension and heart disease (with a little bit of sleep apnea thrown in for good measure).

The oral presentations are by a rather distinguished panel of speakers, and there are even a couple of satellite symposia sponsored by Danone, the Dairy Farmers of Canada, Pfizer, and Hoffman LaRoche.

There is also a healthy dose of posters from attendees around the world – again focussed largely on metabolic health.

I am certain that I will come away from this conference with plenty of new insights into the relationship between abdominal obesity and metabolic health – whether or not, I also come away with a better understanding of what to do about it, I guess, will remain to be seen.

AMS
Quebec City, Quebec