Obesity Management Technology to Experience Significant Growth Through 2018

A new report entitled “Global Opportunities in Obesity Management Technologies” has found that an estimated 1.3 billion people representing nearly 30 percent of the global adult population are overweight or obese, and the share is more than twice that in the United States, Mexico, and selected nations of Europe and the Middle East.

Including its contribution to diabetes and cardiovascular disease, the rise in obesity is placing heavy demands on nations’ health delivery systems and shining a bright light on the unmet need for new approaches and products that can manage and reverse this trend. Diet, exercise programs, and drugs have proven largely ineffective for most patients, and surgery remains an option only for the morbidly obese.

The report, which was distributed by market research group Life Science Intelligence, found that the crisis could benefit from two solutions: The first must address the significant patient population that is already morbidly or severely obese, enabling them to both lose excess weight and moderate the costly health conditions associated with their obesity; the second must provide means for individuals currently overweight or mildly obese to reverse the progression of their disease, thereby slowing and even halting the epidemic.

Device-based options that provide anatomic solutions with low physiologic and safety risks represent the best opportunity to achieve these two goals at present, the report stated. Their uptake will be expedited by a growing private-pay market, which will itself be driven by the growing number of bariatric clinics that offer multiple treatment choices, supported by nutritional and monitoring support. The result will be a rapidly expanding, multi-billion dollar global market for obesity management procedures and technologies that will be shaped by ease-of-use and long-term clinical outcomes.

The report concludes that globally, the obesity technology market will grow at a rate of 21.9 percent per year until 2018.