UK researchers develop tool to identify people most at risk of obesity-related diseases

A new tool that can shed light on who is most at risk of obesity-related diseases could help identify people who would benefit most from weight-loss medications, researchers have said. Recent data suggests about two-thirds of adults in England are overweight or obese – a situation that has caused concern among health experts. Now researchers have developed a tool that, they say, offers an accurate and personalised approach to identifying those at risk of obesity-related conditions. They add it could be useful for prioritising who should receive interventions, such as weight-loss jabs, given that access on the NHS is limited and currently based simply on having a high body mass index (BMI) and particular obesity-related health problems. Prof Nick Wareham, of the University of Cambridge , a co-author of the study, said the measure was not about extending the use of particular therapies. “It’s about developing and validating a score that can help with more rational resource allocation. So, can we prescribe therapy to those people who are most likely to need it and most likely to benefit from it – which is what we should do within the NHS,” he said. Writing in the journal Nature Medicine, the team reports how it applied a type of AI called interpretable machine learning to data from almost 200,000 participants of the long-running UK Biobank project, each of whom had a BMI of 27 or greater, meaning they are overweight or obese. …