Adults with arthritis are likelier to be obese than those without the disease, and of the 54.4 million U.S. adults with arthritis, 32.7 percent are overweight and 38.1 percent are obese, prior studies have demonstrated. New research, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, adds that arthritis patients aren’t receiving sufficient counseling about weight loss.
Overweight and obese adults are four times likelier to try to lose weight if they receive weight-loss counseling, write Dana Guglielmo, of the CDC, and colleagues. Between 2002 and 2014, there was a 10 percentage point increase in the likelihood that overweight or obese patients with arthritis received weight-loss counseling, from 35.1 to 45.5 percent. But that still means more than half of those patients weren’t counseled.
“These improvements are encouraging; however, approximately 75 percent of adults with overweight and 50 percent of those with class 1 obesity are not receiving provider weight-loss counseling,” Guglielmo and colleagues write.
“Weight loss among adults with arthritis and overweight or obesity can reduce pain and disability and improve function, mobility, and health-related quality of life,” adds Jack Cush, director of clinical rheumatology at the Baylor Research Institute, in MedPage.
