Challenges and new directions in obesity management: Lifestyle modification programmes, pharmacotherapy and bariatric surgery

Obesity is a growing health problem worldwide, and it is associated with serious medical and psychosocial comorbidities, impairment of health-related quality of life (HRQoL) and an increased risk of mortality. This article aims to discuss challenges faced by health-care providers when managing patients with obesity and to highlight sustainable policies in clinical practice and future research. All health professionals dealing with obesity should consider lifestyle-modification programmes within a multidisciplinary setting as the key element of weight management. However, standardisation is needed in terms of nature, content and duration of these programmes in order to facilitate their implementation in clinical practice at different levels. Moreover, health professionals should be aware that these programmes, for patients indicating “non-response,” can be combined with recently approved anti-obesity drugs such as liraglutide, naltrexone/bupropion, lorcaserin and phentermine/topiramate, as well as with relatively less invasive bariatric surgery techniques such as Lap Band, endoscopic sleeve gastroplasty and gastric bypass. In any case, neither anti-obesity medication nor bariatric surgery should be considered as a miracle treatment in itself. At the same time, the field of obesity is still lacking in literature on some hot topics that need further investigation, including (i) a new phenotype termed sarcopenic obesity, to clarify its definition, potential health consequences and eventual treatment if necessary; (ii) issues that go beyond body weight, for instance, HRQoL that has been poorly studied in some populations affected by obesity; and (iii) the long-term effect of sleeve gastrectomy technique, which is becoming the most commonly used bariatric surgical procedure, perhaps to be studied using long-term randomised controlled trials that guarantee completeness of follow-up, in order to avoid misunderstanding and bias in interpretation of results.