[Obesity and quality of life]

The health status from the patient's own perspective is being given more importance every day, both with regard to his or her physical aspect and the mental and social aspects, this is the so-called Health Related Quality of Life. In order to evaluate this, tools are being developed that permit a quantification of this qualitative concept, using generic and specific tools which, if adequately validated, will lead to an understanding of the impact of the obesity on the individual, its change over time, enable comparisons with other individuals, with the quality of life of other diseases, with that of a healthy population, or with the general population. They will also allow the patients to be grouped and they will facilitate the study of the mechanisms that have led to the patient being obese and the consequences thereof. The QoL tests will serve to select the treatments and to monitor the efficacy thereof. Although there is no evidence of major psychiatric disease in obese patients considered globally, those with a greater degree of obesity, are more prone to suffering from these. The latter also show an alteration in most of the dimensions explored by the QoL tests and if they subject to a radical weight loss, these improve from the first months on, but it has yet to be determined whether these improvements are maintained over time and whether they are equally manifest in patients with moderate weight losses, and as yet the frustration that the frequent relapses of this disease imply, have not been properly quantified. The rapid development of valid tools to assess the Health Related Quality of Life in obesity, require their use as yet another part of the clinical evaluation of any obese individual.