BATON ROUGE - Three scientists from Pennington Biomedical Research Center are joining a global commission dedicated to generating a new way of diagnosing obesity. 

According to Pennington Biomedical, the commission of more than 50 worldwide experts held events Thursday across the globe to publish the first-ever definition of clinical obesity. One of those launch events was in Baton Rouge at Pennington Biomedical, which is serving as the satellite site for North America.

Pennington Biomedical's three researchers on the commission say this new approach could change how clinical obesity is diagnosed and treated in medical institutions around the world.

"Now we have these two entities, clinical obesity and pre-clinical obesity," said Dr. Philip Schauer with PBRC. "What that means is that individuals who have clinical obesity, not only have elevated body weight, but they also have signs and symptoms of disease. In other words, excess weight is impairing major organ systems. Also, people with clinical obesity have impairment of their activities of daily living, that the obesity is affecting how they go about their day."

This new approach adds new evaluations to the diagnosis, such as measurements of excess body fat and signs and symptoms of health problems.

Schauer says that pre-clinical obesity is essentially a warning.

"In the past, a doctor would tell a patient that their weight's too high, but the patient might say, 'Well doctor, my weight's high, but I feel okay.' We would now call that pre-clinical obesity. They should be monitoring it. Now we can focus on treatment for those people who have actual disease, which we call clinical obesity," Schauer said.

PBRC says that people with clinical obesity should be considered as having an ongoing chronic disease and receive appropriate treatment.

"Obesity is expressed very differently from patient to patient. I've seen individuals 50 pounds overweight that are pretty healthy. I've also seen individuals 20 pounds overweight that already have quite a bit of disease," Schauer said.

Eric Ravussin, a Pennington Biomedical professor, says this new approach would correct some of the faults that relying on BMI to diagnose obesity can have.

"Now we are going away from that and really defining what obesity is, which is excess fat."

Ravussin talked about how medical personnel can measure excess body fat.

"It's either by circumferences of your waist, your hip, and so on, or direct measurement of body fat. We can measure that by different instruments. You also need to have an organ or tissue with disfunction," Ravussin said.

Obesity can lead to an increased risk of developing at least 13 types of cancer. These include the brain, breast, colon, kidney and liver. According to a 2022 report by the Louisiana Department of Health, Louisiana was one of three states to have an obesity rating of 40 percent among adults. 

Senator Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) praised the work of the commission and Pennington saying, "The Lancet Commission's crucial work will help immensely. It will help us better to understand obesity and that will, in turn, inform policy-making in Washington D.C."

Here is a diagram from the meeting regarding new diagnoses: