CHICAGO - Obesity-related diseases account for nearly 10 percent of all US medical spending, or an estimated $147 billion a year, researchers said yesterday.
They said the country’s obesity rates rose 37 percent between 1998 and 2006, driving an 89 percent increase in spending on treatments for obesity-related diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, and other conditions.
Obese people spent an extra $1,429 per year, or 42 percent more, for medical care in 2006 than did normal weight people, the researchers said. Most of that was spent on prescription drugs.
The study, published in the journal Health Affairs, was released at the Weight of the Nation conference in Washington, where the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued 24 new recommendations on how communities can combat the problem.
“It is critical that we take effective steps to contain and reduce the enormous burden of obesity on our nation,’’ Dr. Thomas Frieden, the CDC’s director, said in a statement.
For the study, Eric Finkelstein of the nonprofit research institute RTI International and researchers at the CDC and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality analyzed national medical cost data from 1998 and 2006.
More than 26 percent of Americans are obese, which means they have a body mass index of 30 or higher.
Finkelstein’s team found obesity accounts for 9.1 percent of all medical spending in the United States, up from 6.5 percent in 1998.
“What we found was the total cost of obesity increased from $74 billion to maybe as high as $147 billion today, so roughly double over that time period,’’ Finkelstein said in a phone interview.
