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Editorials |3 December 2019

Integrating Obesity Treatment Into Routine Primary Care

Adam Gilden Tsai, MD, MSCE

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This article was published at Annals.org on 12 November 2019.
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Obesity is among the most common chronic diseases that U.S. primary care physicians see but is arguably the least commonly addressed during routine primary care (1). Many physicians are unfamiliar with the standards of care for treating obesity (2), in part because they are not tested on them (3). Clearly, physicians need better education, training, and tools to help manage obesity as they do other chronic conditions. As with other conditions that require intensive intervention, it is not necessarily the place of the internist to deliver such interventions themselves. Rather, a personalized recommendation for weight loss along with a referral to a structured intervention may be the best approach (4). High-intensity lifestyle modification is recommended as a first step for all patients with a medical indication for weight loss (5).
In their article, Conroy and colleagues report the results of a trial of a behavioral intervention for weight loss maintenance delivered through the electronic health record (EHR) (6). The intervention consisted of EHR-based tools to track diet and physical activity, personalized coaching, and progress reports that were delivered to participants' primary care physicians. Participants who were randomly assigned to the control group received tracking tools but no coaching. Eligible participants had lost a mean of 11% of their initial body weight before study entry. After 24 months of intervention, those in the tracking group regained 4.9 kg, whereas those in the coaching group regained 2.1 kg (P...
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Tsai AG. Integrating Obesity Treatment Into Routine Primary Care. Ann Intern Med. 2019;171:847–848. [Epub ahead of print 12 November 2019]. doi: https://doi.org/10.7326/M19-2988

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Published: Ann Intern Med. 2019;171(11):847-848.

DOI: 10.7326/M19-2988

Published at www.annals.org on 12 November 2019

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2019 American College of Physicians
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