OBESITY HAS the potential to swamp the health service in the next 10-15 years, a senior public health doctor with the Health Service Executive (HSE) said yesterday.
Dr Pat Doorley, national director of population health with the HSE, was speaking at the publication of a new report on the health status of the Irish population which states Irish adults, male and female, have higher rates of overweightedness and obesity than many other European countries.
A study in 2007, it says, found 39 per cent of Irish adults are overweight, with an additional 25 per cent obese.
Dr Doorley said diabetes, heart disease and certain cancers were related to obesity, and an accumulation of all those illnesses, together with the fact obesity levels were rising, meant the health service could be swamped in a few years.
One only had to look at archive footage on TV from the 1970s and 1980s to see the difference. “People are just getting more obese all the time . . . We will have huge consequences in terms of ill-health,” he said.
The worrying thing, he added, was 20-25 per cent of children were either obese or overweight and some parents did not see this. They too had responsibilities, but there was no one solution and people had to be helped to make healthy choices, he said.
Health Status of the Population of Ireland 2008points out that while some aspects of the Irish diet have improved, it is of concern that consumption of fats and salts remains high and over one-fifth of Irish adults report taking no physical activity.
The report states that, compared to 1948, children are now taller and heavier, with the increase in weight disproportionate to the increase in height.
However, life-expectancy has improved. It is now 76.8 years for males and 81.6 years for females, the highest ever. But the report says very few of the 22,000 or so Travellers in Ireland are living into old age, reflecting their poorer health status.
It says death rates from coronary heart disease have been falling dramatically for more than two decades. However, Dr Doorley said our future health and some of these gains are “threatened by twin epidemics of obesity and diabetes, by very high consumption rates of alcohol and by a stubbornly high prevalence of smoking in the adult population”.
The report also stresses that while there has been success in dealing with cancer over the past 20-30 years as a result of some reduction in smoking among adults, “the gains in the prevention of tobacco-related cancers run a risk of being offset by the increase in obesity rates, rising alcohol consumption and excess exposure to ultraviolet rays from sun holidays and use of cosmetic tanning salons”.
Hospital inpatient data suggests people outside the Dublin area have significantly less access to cardiac interventions. The document states that while there has been a marked increase in coronary angioplasty, a surgical procedure to unblock the coronary artery, over the last 10 years residents of Dublin had the highest rates for undergoing the procedure.
The report warns that unless stroke care is addressed in an organised and systematic way, from prevention to continuing care, the burden placed on patients, families and the health services will increase as our ageing population continues to grow.
Furthermore, it says despite our recent history of being one of the best-performing economies in the EU, we are still one of the worst performers on child poverty, with one in every nine children in Ireland living in consistent poverty.
Main Points
- Life expectancy is now at its highest level ever.
- The prevalence of the overweight and obesity in Ireland is higher than most EU countries.
- Irish people are one of the highest consumers of alcohol in Europe. Higher proportion of Irish adults report binge-drinking compared with the EU population.
- More than a third of the population reports having a chronic illness.
- A number of risk factors for poor health needs to be tackled, including elevated blood pressure, tobacco use, inappropriate use of alcohol, high cholesterol, overweight and obesity, low fruit and vegetable intake and low physical activity.