The Endocrinology and Nutrition Service of the Arnau de Vilanova University Hospital in Lleida has inaugurated this June a new external consultation aimed at the comprehensive study of patients with obesity, with the aim of evaluating in the best way all the first visits that arrive at the hospital. service.
Each year they attend to an average of 300 first visits from obesity patients. “This consultation wants to eradicate the message that people with obesity receive about the need to lose weight without first having inquired about their personal history, their conditions and their social environment,” explains Albert Lecube, head of the Endocrinology and Nutrition Service.
In this new consultation, a complete study of the disease situation is carried out, where the main contributing factors are evaluated, such as intake, quality of life, hours and quantity of sleep and the degree of physical activity. “We try to better understand the internal causes that produce it in order to have more information related to its prognosis,” says Lecube.
In this way, the new service performs a study of body composition, an ultrasound evaluation of the musculature and the layers of abdominal fat, the transcutaneous oxygen pressure in the abdomen is determined and a biopsy of the subcutaneous adipose tissue is performed for this purpose. Assess your degree of fibrous inflammation. The study is complemented by various questionnaires and the collection of analytical data and it is planned to include the amount of liver fat and the degree of liver fibrosis.
“We want to bring precision medicine closer and personalize it to patients with obesity and to be able to provide more complete information about the disease to people who live with it”, concludes Lecube. Obesity is a chronic, relapsing, exceptionally complex disease without curative treatment that affects 23% of the population.
