Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 March 2020
Obesity is an increasingly common chronic disease. Its biopsychosocial basis provides the rationale of multidisciplinary interventions, such as Therapeutic Patient Education (TPE, WHO 1998), which is effective for lifestyle change and awareness improvement, thus reducing the disease's prevalence and its health care-related financial burden. However, patients’ socio-demographic and psychopathological factors may influence TPE's effectiveness.
We aimed to assess the effectiveness of an 8-week TPE program in obese patients candidates for bariatric surgery and identify factors predicting its success.
We enrolled 159 patients with a BMI > 35 Kg/m2 and obesity-related comorbidities (females = 71.3%; age range = 18-35 years) at the C.A.S.C.O. (EASO COMs) of our University Hospital. They filled out the Binge Eating Scale (BES), the Symptom Checklist-90-R (SCL-90-R), and the Short Form-36 Health Survey (SF-36). We used Tukey's multiple comparison test to assess Quality of Life (QoL) improvement after TPE and multivariate logistic regression to estimate the size of the association between TPE and the aforementioned factors.
The SF-36 showed a significant improvement (P < 0.05) of physical and mental QoL post-TPE, especially in obese patients without binge eating disorder. The same applied to BES and SCL-90-R scores. The factors predicting TPE success were a short duration of obesity, a limited number of past diets, and low levels of anxiety/depression pre-TPE.
In obese patients candidates for bariatric surgery, TPE is useful to improve physical and mental QoL, eating behavior, and psychological status. Several factors are predictive of TPE success, allowing a personalization of the intervention to render it more effective.
The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.
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