Key result
Obesity exacerbates the severity of COVID-19 through chronic inflammation and impaired immune responses, highlighting the critical need for healthy lifestyle interventions during the pandemic.
Why the study?
The COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns aggravated public health challenges alongside a rising burden of obesity and obesity-associated diseases.
Obesity significantly increases the risk of severe COVID-19 outcomes due to chronic inflammation and altered immune responses, underscoring the critical need for lifestyle interventions during the pandemic.
Supports obesity as COVID-19 severity modifier; leaves open whether lifestyle interventions improve outcomes in prospective trials.
COVID-19 pandemic aggravated the global public health system, which is already overwhelmed by the increasing statistics of comorbidities and burden due to obesity. The number of individuals with obesity and obesity-associated diseases are rising in many regions that could attribute to the growing obesogenic environment and the lockdown implemented to curb COVID-19. This review focuses on the aspects of the obesity epidemic, chronic inflammatory effects of obesity, positive outcomes of obesity interventions and the worsening effects observed in obese COVID-19 patients. The chronic inflammatory effects of obesity are apparent by the increase of pro-inflammatory signals by immune cells in the adipose tissue and reactive species populations. The reduction of antioxidants exacerbates the effects of oxidative stress on genomic and tissue levels. The public must be made aware of the importance of practising a healthier lifestyle, even more now as we are fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Zia et al. (2022) conducted a review in Obesity and COVID-19. Obesity exacerbates the severity of COVID-19 through chronic inflammation and impaired immune responses, highlighting the critical need for healthy lifestyle interventions during the pandemic.
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