Will Severe Obesity go the Way of Malignant Hypertension?

Back in the mid-eighties, when I was still training in nephrology, it seemed not a week would go by without being called upon to attend to a patient with malignant hypertension. 

These patients, with blood pressures well over 200/120 mmHg, would often show up with no prior anti-hypertensive medication or, in some cases, not even a known diagnosis of hypertension. Without immediate attention, these patients were in acute danger of progressing to kidney or heart failure or experiencing strokes. 

Today, 40 years later, malignant hypertension is a comparatively rare occurrence and can generally be well managed thanks to major advances in and widespread early use of anti-hypertensive medications.

Given the current splurge and momentum we are witnessing in ever more effective anti-obesity medications, I wonder if we will be looking back in a couple of decades remembering the days when we used to routinely see patients with BMIs of 50, 60, 70, 80, or even higher, with all of the accompanying complications.

Indeed, the only reason why so many patients with severe obesity exist today, is that this progressive chronic disease has largely gone untreated (with the exception of the tiny brave minority that may have undergone bariatric surgery).

After all, everyone living with severe obesity today, must at some point have had less severe obesity. That should have been the time where they should have been appropriately diagnosed and managed to halt progression and to avoid complications.

Thus far, that has not been the case. Even today, despite advances in obesity treatments, people living with early stages (or even later stages) of obesity receive virtually no obesity care, which is why we continue to see such large numbers of untreated individuals progressing to severe obesity with all its complications.

Now, with the recent developments in anti-obesity medications, I can foresee a future where severe obesity eventually goes the way of malignant hypertension – it goes back to being the rare disorder it once was.

How long will this take? It all depends on just how soon we can take obesity seriously, implement early detection and clinical care, and make effective obesity treatments available to everyone who needs them.

We have done it for hypertension – we can do it for obesity.

@DrSharma
Berlin, D