Combating pediatric obesity in Germany: the role of economic findings in informing policy

Abstract

As in most countries, overweight and obesity among children and adolescents have dramatically increased in Germany over the last two decades. This serious public-health challenge has stimulated many efforts to curb the pediatric obesity epidemic. In this article, the authors briefly describe these efforts and examine the role of health economics in informing German health policies and evaluating the outcomes of interventions aimed at reducing pediatric obesity. The findings indicate that the tools of health-economic analysis have rarely been used to guide the development of strategies to prevent pediatric obesity and to support decision-making on the use of the scarce resources available for preventive actions. The authors give some reasons why health economics has not been an important policy tool so far and make some recommendations for how this could be changed. Reasons impeding health economics playing a more important role in this area are the existence of many unsolved issues in the methods of health economic evaluation and large gaps in the knowledge base on the effectiveness of interventions. Nevertheless, these methods should be considered to be indispensible tools of health policy development. However, taking into account the broad range of political and societal concerns related to pediatric obesity, decision-making in this area will ultimately rest on a process of deliberate thinking integrating different perspectives among, which health economics will be one.

Keywords::

• children
• cost–effectiveness
• Germany
• health economics
• health policy
• obesity
• prevention

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the four anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and recommendations, which contributed to the improvement of this paper.

Financial & competing interests disclosure

This work was supported by the Competence Network Obesity funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (grant numbers 01GI1127 and 01GI0826). The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed apart from those disclosed.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.