The OPQRST Of Body Weight



The assessment of weight history is no doubt a key feature of obesity assessment. Not only can weight history and trajectories provide important insights into obesity related risk but, perhaps more importantly, provide key information on precipitating factors and drivers of excessive weight gain.

Now, in a short article published in MedEdPublish, Robert Kushner discusses how the well-known OPQRST mnemonic for assessing a “chief complaint”  can be applied to assess body weight.

In short, OPQRST is a mnemonic for Onset, Precipitating, Quality of Life, Remedy, Setting, and Temporal pattern. Applied to obesity, Kushner provides the following sample questions for each item:

Onset: “When did you first begin to gain weight?” “What did you weight in high school, college, early 20s, 30s, 40s?” “What was your heaviest weight?”

Precipitating: “What life events led to your weight gain, e.g., college, long commute, marriage, divorce, financial loss?” “How much weight did you gain with pregnancy?” “How much weight did you gain when you stopped smoking?” “How much weight did you gain when you started insulin?”

Quality of life: “At what weight did you feel your best?” “What is hard to do at your current weight?”

Remedy: “What have you done or tried in the past to control your weight?” “What is the most successful approach you tried to lose weight?” “What do you attribute the weight loss to?” “What caused you to gain your weight back?”

Setting: “What was going on in your life when you last felt in control of your weight?” “What was going on when you gained your weight?” “What role has stress played in your weight gain?” “How important is social support or having a buddy to help you?”

Temporal pattern: “What is the pattern of your weight gain?” “Did you gradually gain your weight over time, or is it more cyclic (yo-yo)?” “Are there large swings in your weight, and if so, what is the weight change?”

As Kushner notes,

“These features provide a contextual understanding of how and when patients gained weight, what efforts were employed to take control, and the impact of body weight on their health. Furthermore, by using a narrative or autobiographical approach to obtaining the weight history, patients are able to express, in their own words, a life course perspective of the underlying burden, frustration, struggle, stigma or shame associated with trying to manage body weight. Listening should be unconditional and nonjudgmental. By letting patients tell their story, the clinician is also able to assess the patients’ awareness, knowledge, motivation, decision-making, and resiliency regarding weight management. The narrative provides a basis for approaching the patients’ weight holistically, as well as beginning to formulate diagnostic and therapeutic options.”

There is no doubt much to be gained in understanding obesity by allowing patients to tell their own weight stories.

@DrSharma
Berlin, D