Artūras Smirnovas ¹

¹Viešoji įstaiga Respublikinė Šiaulių ligoninė

The count of obese people worldwide grows exponentially every day and it becomes one of the biggest public health problems. Obesity is not only a risk factor for health conditions like cardiovascular disease, which are the main death reason in Lithuania in both sex groups, second type diabetes, metabolic syndrome but also stands as independent disorder that causes physical, psychological and social problems. Careful anamnesis pick-up and physical examination helps to determine a risk caused by current obesity. During anamnesis collection besides finding out the main reason, eating and physical activity habits as well important is to discover and understand patients’ psychological condition, goals and motivation achieving them. During physical examination we are investigating patient’s height, weight and estimating BMI (body mass index). Sometimes, because of the different physiological and pathological patient’s conditions, evaluating the obesity’s caused risk based on BMI may be not enough. It is recommended to evaluate BMI along other dimension like waist circumference. Additionally, other kind of ratios could be measured, like height and waist circumference ratio or waist and pelvic circumference ratio, but those measures are more complicated to measure and not always more accurate for risk evaluation. After physical criteria measuring and anamnesis pick up, step further should be obesity risk for pathological conditions evaluation which will help to prepare treatment and recommendations plan for patient. In this article we will find out how to perform physical examination and which methods are preferred, the most common cardiovascular complications caused by obesity and how to choose a correct treatment tactic.

Keywords: obesity, overweight, physical examination, treatment tactic, cardiovascular diseases risk