STATISTICAL BRIEF #20

In 2004, there were 1.7 million hospital stays during which obesity was noted, accounting for about 6 percent of all hospital stays—an increase of 112 percent since 1996. Among those principally hos-pitalized for obesity, 55.2 per-cent were age 18–44 and most of the remaining (42.9 percent) were age 45-64; only 1.2 per-cent were 65 or older. For those with obesity as a secondary di-agnosis only, 23.7 percent were age 18-44 and 28.5 percent were 65 or older. Although just over 30 percent of both men and women were obese, about 82 percent of those with a principal diagnosis of obesity and 63.5 percent of those with obesity as a coexist-ing condition were women. The mean length of a hospital stay for obesity as a principal diagnosis was 3.1 days, but when obesity was a coexisting condition, the mean length of stay was 4.9 days. In the Northeast, 5.8 hospital stays per 10,000 were princi-pally for obesity; in other re-gions, these stays ranged from 3.8 to 4.0 per 10,000. However, in the Northeast and West, 45 stays per 10,000 listed obesity as a secondary diagnosis, while rates were much higher in the Midwest and South, at 57 and 60 stays per 10,000. The most common principal diagnosis associated with obesity was coronary athero-sclerosis, accounting for nearly 7 percent of all patients with obesity. This was 75 percent higher than among the non-obese hospitalized population. For hospital stays with obesity as a principal diagnosis, the majority involved gastric bypass and volume reduction surgery