A new research letter published in JAMA Pediatrics is shedding light on just how much obesity contributes to serious health conditions in young people. The study, led by Yale School of Medicine medical student Ashwin Chetty, estimates the extent to which obesity-related conditions (ORCs) can be tied to obesity and overweight in adolescents and young adults across the United States.
Chetty and his team used publicly available data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) to dig into the numbers. The goal? To better understand how much obesity directly contributes to conditions like prediabetes, hypertension, and dyslipidemia, and how preventing or treating obesity might lower those risks.
As Chetty explains,
Obesity can cause hypertension, for example, but many people have hypertension who don’t have obesity. So, we want to know how many hypertension cases are caused by obesity. And that’s important because that gives us an estimate of the impact obesity has on hypertension and diseases like it and by extension, the impact that treating or preventing obesity can have on those diseases.
Building on previous research
This wasn’t Chetty’s first time tackling the question of obesity’s role in chronic conditions. While working with Alissa Chen, MD, MPH, and Alexandra Hajduk, PhD, MPH, he had already applied similar methods to study older adults ages 65 and up.
That earlier work sparked an idea. After meeting James Nugent, MD, MPH, at a pediatrics interest group, Chetty realized the same approach could be applied to adolescents and young adults, a group that hadn’t been studied as extensively. He teamed up with Dr. Nugent and Mona Sharifi, MD, MPH, to adapt the research for a younger population.
Just weeks before this new paper, the group had already published another piece in JAMA Pediatrics titled “Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 Receptor Agonist Eligibility Among US Adolescents and Young Adults.” Using those earlier definitions and methods, Chetty was able to compile fresh data for this latest study on ORCs.
A collaborative effort across specialties
One thing that stands out about this research is the cross-disciplinary teamwork. Physicians and researchers from adult medicine, geriatrics, and pediatrics — groups that don’t often overlap — came together to ask big-picture questions.
Chetty says,
We’re asking questions that bridge a lot of different populations… One of the nice things about being a medical student is that I can pivot between research on adults and research in pediatrics. The faculty who I worked with were all really open to taking part in this research. People’s openness to work on ideas that might not be squarely in their field of interest is something I really appreciate about the faculty at Yale.
What the numbers show
The findings highlight just how significant obesity’s impact is on young people’s health. The study estimated that 20–35% of adolescent cases of prediabetes, hypertension and dyslipidemia are attributable to obesity. Also, 40% of young adult cases of these same conditions can be traced back to obesity.
Chetty breaks it down:
Our interpretation of that statistical conclusion is if you were able to eliminate obesity from this population, you would reduce the prevalence of those obesity-related conditions by that amount.
Looking ahead
The team isn’t stopping here. The next step is to model the potential long-term benefits of treating obesity earlier in life. Could early intervention lower future rates of hypertension or diabetes? And what would that mean for overall healthcare costs?
Dr. Nugent praised Chetty’s initiative, noting,
This work is a testament to Ashwin who asked interesting questions and found clever ways to answer them with publicly available data. Not many people get published in JAMA Pediatrics twice in a year, never mind twice in the same month. And he’s not working with a million-dollar grant, he’s asking good questions and finding ways to answer them with NHANES data.
Your responses and feedback are welcome!
Source: “Examining the Impact of Treating and Preventing Obesity to Prevent Obesity-Related Conditions,” Yale School of Medicine, 8/25/25
Source: “Proportion of Obesity-Related Conditions Attributable to Obesity and Overweight in US Youth,” JAMA Pediatrics, 8/25/25
Source: “What’s the Cause of Obesity-Related Conditions in Youth?,” Medscape, 8/25/25
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