Biomedical engineering and the obesity epidemic: treatments for weight reduction

Obesity is becoming increasingly common, with at least 400 million obese adults worldwide and the World Health Organization (WHO) projecting that this statistic will reach 700 million in another five years. Ironically, despite the fact that a majority of adults in developed nations are overweight or obese, society stigmatizes the obese severely. Still, obese people have more than just social motivations for losing weight; obesity commonly goes hand in hand with life-threatening comorbidities like cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes and some forms of cancer. It severely threatens quality of life, limiting the ability to move and work, navigate public places, and provide care for others and is a factor in musculoskeletal disorders like osteoarthritis. Both obesity and its comorbidities lead obese patients to hospitals at greater rates than patients of normal weight, and these factors, along with social pressures, motivate patients and their physicians to pursue solutions for obesity, its comorbidities, or both.