The impact of overweight and obesity on the direct medical costs of truck drivers.
OBJECTIVE
The primary goal of the study was to quantify health care costs of truckers across categories of normal weight, overweight, and obese.


METHODS
Health care claims data from a transportation logistics company were obtained from 2004 to 2005 and were merged with body mass index measures. A robust multivariate ordinary least squares regression model was used to adjust for demographic and occupational variables.


RESULTS
Two thousand eight hundred forty-nine truckers had a mean annual total health care cost of $1785. Unadjusted trimmed total cost for overweight subjects ($1613) and obese subjects ($1792) were significantly higher than for normal weight subjects ($1012; P < 0.05). After multivariate adjustment, obese and overweight subjects had on average, $591 (P = 0.031) and $383 (P = 0.188) higher total trimmed health care cost than normal weight subjects.


CONCLUSIONS
Both overweight and obese individuals had higher health care costs and higher prevalence of hyperlipidemia, diabetes, and hypertension than their normal weight counterparts.
Martin
Bradley C
BC
Division of Pharmaceutical Evaluation and Policy, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock, AR 72205, USA. bmartin@uams.edu
Church
Timothy S
TS
Bonnell
Ron
R
Ben-Joseph
Rami
R
Borgstadt
Ted
T
D001334:Automobile Driving; D015992:Body Mass Index; D017281:Cost of Illness; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D005260:Female; D017048:Health Care Costs; D006801:Humans; D016018:Least-Squares Analysis; D008297:Male; D018986:Motor Vehicles; D009765:Obesity / Q000191:economics*; D050177:Overweight / Q000191:economics*; D012189:Retrospective Studies; D014481:United States