Excess weight and multimorbidity: putting people's health experience in risk factor epidemiology

Prospective cohorts have greatly advanced our understanding of the causes of premature death and disease occurrence. This knowledge has subsequently been used to improve public health through disease prevention, ranging from policies to control tobacco and alcohol for entire populations, to guidelines for blood pressure and lipid management in individual patients.1 In particular, analyses of prospective cohorts have shown that excess weight, as measured by BMI, is a risk factor for all-cause as well as cause-specific mortality.