Frequency of overweight and obesity in patients suffering from COVID-19

Tatjana Zdravković, Tatjana Egic, Tatjana Pokusevski

Keywords: overweight, obesity, COVID-19,

Aim:

Obesity promotes chronic inflammation, deficiency of vitamin D, interferes with immunity, and causes mechanical lung compression. This increases susceptibility to infection with COVID-19, and complications, including the need for invasive ventilation.
The aim is to determine the frequency of overweight and obesity of patients suffering from COVID-19 and to determine whether there is a difference concerning gender.

Method:

The study analyses the body mass index value, recorded in the patient’s electronic record of the "Novi Sad" Health Centre, who suffered from COVID-19 infection. The consent for using the data was obtained by the Ethics Commission of the Health center.

Results:

The data of 19,950 patients were analysed, of which 11,147 (55.87%) were women and 8,803 (44.13%) were men suffering from COVID-19, whose medical records recorded data on body height, body mass, and calculated BMI.
The average age of the subjects was 49.81 years, and the average value of the BMI index was 26.43 kg/m2. 7333 (36.76%) were overweight, while 4222 (21.16%) were obese. In relation to gender, 4120 (46.80%) male and 3213 (28.82%) female persons had excessive body mass. There were 2134 (24.24%) male obese persons, and 2088 (18.73%) female obese persons. There is a significant statistical difference in the level of nutrition concerning gender (p<0.005).

Conclusions:

More than half of the patients suffering from COVID-19 had excess body weight and obesity, which represented a risk of getting a more severe form of the disease. Obesity is not only a risk factor for severe forms of COVID-19, but also for other chronic non-communicable diseases, so doctors must prevent and timely treat obesity and promote healthy lifestyles.

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