Global prevalence of obesity in patients with psoriatic arthritis

[Caroline]

I hate these studies were they misrepresent the facts and make inferences that aren’t there. How do we know that PSA isn’t the underlying disease that contributes to obesity?

I agree partly with Mata.

As I see it this study reports a high prevalence of obesity among patients with psoriatic arthritis (PsA), these figures should be interpreted with caution, as no direct comparison with matched populations without PsA was performed.

I have done a bit of research and then you see that obesity affects approximately 13% of the adult population, while the prevalence among patients with PsA was 35%, suggesting a substantially higher value of obese people.
But global numbers do not say anything about how that is per country. E.g. obesity is known to be very high in the states.
And also age can be of influence, so you should be very much more precise in your analyses.

But on average I do think it is clear that there is an association between PsA and obesity. An analyses as above does not contribute very much to that what we already know.
What would have been more valuable is research in the mechanisms that cause this obesity, are the physical are they psychological? Or are there other reasons.