Obesity Affects Men and Women Differently, Study Finds
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- Dokuz Eylul University researchers analyzed 886 women (average age 45) and 248 men (average age 41) treated at their obesity clinic in Turkey between 2024-2025, identifying clear sex-based differences in how obesity manifests.
- Men with obesity showed significantly higher liver enzymes (ALT and GGT), triglycerides, and creatinine—pointing to greater liver-related and metabolic complications—alongside a waist circumference of 120cm versus 108cm in women.
- Women with obesity had higher total cholesterol (215 vs 203 mg/dL) and LDL "bad" cholesterol (130 vs 123 mg/dL), plus elevated inflammatory markers including C-reactive protein, erythrocyte sedimentation rate, and platelet count.
- Lead author Dr. Zeynep Pekel attributed the differences to hormones (especially oestrogen), immune system activity, and fat distribution patterns, arguing these biological factors could inform targeted, sex-based obesity therapies.
- The study carries significant limitations: it is cross-sectional (no cause-effect determination), the participant pool was overwhelmingly Turkish, and the findings have not yet been published as a full peer-reviewed paper.
- The research was presented at the European Congress on Obesity (ECO) in Istanbul (May 12-15) and places obesity's sex split within a broader context: roughly 1.54 billion adults worldwide were living with metabolic syndrome in 2023, about 1 in 3 women and 1 in 4 men.
Why it matters: With 1.54 billion adults living with metabolic syndrome globally and current obesity treatments producing uneven results, sex-specific approaches could meaningfully shift clinical practice—but only if the findings replicate beyond this Turkish-only sample of 1,134 patients. Pekel herself called the work "early days" and said the next step is validation in larger, more diverse populations before targeted therapies can be designed.
