April 29, 2020 — Jennifer Lighter, MD, a hospital epidemiologist in New York City, says within the first few days that she began treating COVID-19 patients in her hospital, she and other doctors quickly saw a pattern.
“I don’t think obese people are as prevalent in China compared to the U.S., so they didn’t have much data on this,” says Lighter, who works at New York University Langone Health. “But for us, it was very obvious and noticeable, even in those few first days, that there were a lot of young people in the ICU, and what stood out among the group of younger patients was their body weight. You couldn’t help but notice that they were all heavier-set.”
Lighter wanted to better understand if there really was a link between coronavirus and obesity, so she and Anna Stachel, assistant director of the Department of Infection Prevention and Control at NYU Langone Health, did a study of 3,615 patients under the age of 60 who tested positive for COVID-19. They found that body weight did not significantly raise the risk of hospitalization or more severe illness for people over 60. But it did in patients younger than 60, compared to those with a healthy body mass index, which is less than 30. The research showed:
- Patients with a BMI of 30-34 were twice as likely to get admitted to the hospital or to be admitted to acute care.
- Patients with a BMI of 35 or higher were twice as likely to be admitted to the hospital and three times as likely to end up in the intensive care unit.
“Patients who are obese are coming into the emergency department and presenting for medical care more because they are sicker. Once here, those with a higher BMI are also more likely to be admitted and more likely to end up in the ICU,” Lighter explains.
She says this is very important information for the U.S., since 42% of the American population has a BMI over 30 and is considered obese. “Our hospital was one of the first to find the association between obesity and coronavirus, but I think it will soon become very common,” Lighter says. “I expect every medical center in the U.S. will eventually see this.”
Data Is Piling Up
Leonardo Seoane, MD, is the chief academic officer, senior vice president, and pulmonary critical care doctor at Ochsner Health in New Orleans, which, like New York, has been an epicenter of this virus. He says over time, he and his colleagues began to see the connection between obesity and severe coronavirus symptoms in younger patients.
“We have an epidemic with obesity in the southern United States,” Seoane says. “Treating obese patients in the ICU is not new to us, so when we first started to get inundated with severely infected COVID patients ending up in the ICU, it didn’t necessarily raise an alarm for us because we typically take care of many obese patients in the ICU,” he explains. “In time, we started to realize this was different, though, as it became clear that the majority of the younger people in the ICU with coronavirus were obese.”
That inspired Seoane and the Ochsner Center for Outcomes and Health Services Research team to gather data. They studied 3,000 patients who tested positive for the coronavirus in his hospital system and found that 59% of the hospitalized patients were obese with an average BM