Current and future burden of obesity in the Hungarian Roma population II

Population-specific obesity in different age groups and in the Roma population as well as the presence of noncommunicable diseases that are linked to obesity necessitate the development of ethnical-specific prevention and intervention programmes.

Our goal is to model the effects on nutritional status of interventional programmes of different intensities carried out in various age groups of the Roma population.

We defined the effect of different public health interventions on the state of health of the Roma population by use of the Dynamic Modeling for Health Impact Assessment software. Two models of interventions were studied throughout our research: one that focuses on only one aspect of lifestyle changes; and one that includes radical prevention programmes that aim to change lifestyles as a whole and have an impact on nutritional status.

Nearly 20% of Roma men and women are obese, and by 2070, one third of the Roma population will be overweight or obese without any public health intervention. Not even when the most efficient proceedings of the scientific literature are applied do prevention-intervention programmes of moderate-intensity offer a perceptible result about the incidence and prevalence of diseases linked to obesity. In the case of application of these programs, not more than a ten-person order of magnitude decrease can be achieved. This is not enough to prove a statistical detectability on the population level. Whereas, complex intervention programmes, based on a comprehensive transformation of lifestyle and food consumption patterns can present perceptible outcome primarily among the middle-aged and the elderly.

The survey results direct attention to the fact that reducing the burden of disease in the Roma population caused by obesity is only to be achieved as a complex, all-councils act that requires resources much greater than what is available now. Orv Hetil. 2020; 161(27): 1137-1145.