Events

AHSC seminar: Tackling and treating childhood and adult obesity

Join us for the next in the AHSC seminar series, where an expert from the Trust will pair up with an academic from the College to talk about their latest work in obesity.

Professor Majid Ezzati, of Imperial College London’s School of Public Health, and Professor Tricia Tan, consultant in diabetes, endocrinology and metabolic medicine at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, will talk about their work on global obesity trends and a new non-invasive treatment for adult obesity.

Professor Ezzati will talk about his work leading the largest study looking at global obesity rates in children and adults. According to the study, the number of obese children and adolescents worldwide has risen tenfold in the past four decades.

If current trends continue, more children and adolescents will be obese than moderately or severely underweight by 2022. Similarly, the number of obese adults increased from 100 million in 1975 to 671 million in 2016.

Professor Ezzati will also describe how blood pressure and diabetes have changed as BMI has increased, and what these changes tell us about the expected health effects of the worldwide rise in BMI.

Professor Tan will talk about her work developing an injection that helps people lose weight. The injection has been hailed as a ‘breakthrough treatment’ for obesity. She found that patients eat 30 per cent less food after receiving the injection, which mimics the effect of a gastric bypass. In some cases the injection was so successful that patients were able to come off their diabetes medication, a condition linked to obesity.

Her team hope to create a therapy within five years that can be as effective as bariatric surgery but administered as monthly injections.

Lunch will be served following the presentations.