Post-War course of the prevalence of extreme overweight among Danish young men

Abstract

The course of the prevalence of marked obesity, defined as extreme overweight (E.O. equal to W H 2 ⩾ 31 kg/m 2, W = weight, H = height ) was determined in the virtually unselected and homogeneous population of 377,200 Danish young men enrolled as liable for military service in the Copenhagen area and an adjacent provincial area during the periods 1943–1974 and 1964–1974, respectively. In the Copenhagen area, the prevalence of E.O. (per 1000) was constant at about 1 from 1943 to 1960. Thereafter it rose steeply up to 7 in 1974. In the provincial area, the prevalence was 4 in 1964 as in the Copenhagen area, but it rose more steeply and reached 16 in 1974. The prevalence increased similarly in all degrees of E.O. The changes could not be predicted from changes in the central range of the distribution of W H 2 in the study population. This investigation shows that marked obesity, defined as E.O., has a distinct and uniform epidemiology. The results suggest that a sudden, radical change in the epidemiology, involving a change in the causal factors, occurred by the generation 1942 at some time prior to 1961. This knowledge may facilitate the search for the causal factor in marked obesity.