Tirzepatide for Obesity Treatment

Overweight and obesity are global issues with major health consequences, including cardiovascular, kidney, and metabolic diseases and cancer. These conditions decrease life expectancy, with an estimated 5 to 20 years of life lost depending on their severity and associated comorbid disorders. Despite lower body mass index (BMI; calculated as weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared), Asian individuals, including Chinese people, have increased visceral or abdominal adiposity and are at higher risk of developing diabetes and other obesity-related comorbidities at a lower BMI than populations of other ancestries. Because of these observations, the Chinese Working Group on Obesity defined overweight as a BMI greater than or equal to 24 to less than 28 and obesity as BMI greater than or equal to 28 in Chinese people for health surveillance and management. In a cross-sectional survey of 15.8 million adults in China conducted in 2019, 34.8% of participants were overweight and 14.1% were obese. In a study conducted in Shanghai, China, involving 2776 adults, more than one-third had abdominal obesity defined by waist-to-hip ratio (≥0.9 in men and ≥0.85 in women) as recommended by the World Health Organization. Of notable concern is the growing prevalence of obesity in China; from 2004 to 2018, the number of individuals with obesity in China rose 3-fold.