{"id":3858,"date":"2010-10-11T16:53:31","date_gmt":"2010-10-11T20:53:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/?p=3858"},"modified":"2011-07-19T17:44:46","modified_gmt":"2011-07-19T21:44:46","slug":"obesity-good-news-and-bad-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/2010\/10\/11\/obesity-good-news-and-bad-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Obesity: Good News and Bad News"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Two new trials and accompanying editorials published online in <em>JAMA<\/em> offer hope that lifestyle interventions can result in significant weight loss. The bad news: The results are fairly modest, and it is difficult to obtain reimbursement for lifestyle interventions.<\/p>\n<p>In one study, <a href=\"http:\/\/jama.ama-assn.org\/cgi\/content\/full\/jama.2010.1503\">Cheryl Rock and colleague<\/a>s compared usual care with a program that included free prepared meals and counseling in 442 overweight or obese women. After 2 years, weight loss in subjects who received prepared meals and either center-based or telephone-based counseling was significantly greater than weight loss in subjects who received usual care (7.4 kg and 6.2 kg vs. 2 kg, P &lt;0.001 for intervention effect). But <a href=\"http:\/\/jama.ama-assn.org\/cgi\/content\/full\/jama.2010.1529\">in an accompanying editorial,<\/a> Rena Wing\u00a0writes that the results &#8220;probably represent a best-case scenario&#8221; and that &#8220;it is time to directly compare the outcomes achieved in a variety of different commercial weight loss programs and to examine whether providing these programs free of charge to participants would be a cost-effective approach.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>In a second study, <a href=\"http:\/\/jama.ama-assn.org\/cgi\/content\/full\/jama.2010.1505\">Bret Goodpaster and colleagues<\/a> randomized 130 severely obese adults (mostly women) to diet and exercise for 12 months, or to a 6-month period of diet alone followed by 6 months of diet and exercise. At 6 months, people in the combination diet-exercise group lost more weight than the diet-only group, but at 12 months, weight loss was similar in the two groups.\u00a0In <a href=\"http:\/\/jama.ama-assn.org\/cgi\/content\/full\/jama.2010.1531\">an accompanying editorial<\/a>, Donna Ryan and Robert Kushner note that reimbursement for nonsurgical treatment of obesity is rare, adding: &#8220;Physicians should not be discouraged from implementing nonsurgical medical care approaches in this population, but payers need to rethink their policies.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Two new trials and accompanying editorials published online in JAMA offer hope that lifestyle interventions can result in significant weight loss. The bad news: The results are fairly modest, and it is difficult to obtain reimbursement for lifestyle interventions. In one study, Cheryl Rock and colleagues compared usual care with a program that included free [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":196,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[297,284],"class_list":["post-3858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prevention","tag-diet","tag-obesity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/196"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3858"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3858\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}