Economic Impact of Childhood Obesity on Health Systems

The global rise in childhood obesity has led to substantial financial strain on health systems. Direct costs include medical consultations, hospital admissions, pharmaceuticals and diagnostic procedures, while indirect costs arise from school absenteeism, parental productivity losses and long-term management of chronic conditions. Childhood obesity frequently coexists with respiratory, metabolic and orthopaedic comorbidities that drive demand for specialised care from paediatric to adult services. Comparative studies across high-, middle- and low-income settings reveal stark differences in cost structures and resource allocation, with microcosting research demonstrating that outpatient weight-management programmes can be highly resource-intensive. Time-trend analyses report exponential increases in obesity-related hospitalisations, underscoring the need for early, cost-effective preventive strategies, integration of obesity screening into primary care and adoption of digital health tools to curb anticipated future expenditures.

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Economic Impact of Childhood Obesity on Health Systems publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in economic impact of childhood obesity on health systems across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Healthcare utilisation: the frequency and intensity with which health services are used by individuals or populations, including outpatient visits, hospital admissions and prescription medications.

Direct healthcare costs: expenses directly linked to medical care provision, such as fees for consultations, treatments, diagnostics and pharmaceuticals.

Microcosting: a detailed, bottom-up costing method that assigns monetary values to each resource consumed in a care pathway to produce precise cost estimates.

Prevalence: the proportion of a population with a particular health condition at a specified time or over a defined period.

Cost-consequence analysis: an economic evaluation approach that presents costs alongside multiple outcomes without aggregating them into a single summary measure.

References

1. Association between adolescent obesity and early adulthood healthcare utilization—a two-cohort prospective study. BMC Medicine (2025).
2. Medical and non-medical complications among children and adolescents with excessive body weight. BMC Pediatrics (2014).
3. Rising Obesity-Related Hospital Admissions among Children and Young People in England: National Time Trends Study. PLOS ONE (2013).
4. Trends in the prevalence of obesity and estimation of the direct health costs attributable to child and adolescent obesity in Brazil from 2013 to 2022. PLOS ONE (2025).
5. Direct costs for outpatient excess body weight treatment in Brazilian children and adolescents attending a public children's hospital. Jornal de Pediatria (2024).