A study co-led by Darwin Vice Master Professor Angela Wood, and her PhD student Rob Fletcher of St John’s College, demonstrates that rates of obesity since the pandemic show an increasing correlation with social deprivation.
Working with researchers from the British Heart Foundation Data Science Centre at Health Data Research UK and The George Institute for Global Health, the study used anonymised NHS England electronic health records covering nearly 55 million adults. Looking at obesity trends from 2019 to 2025, it found that overall new cases of obesity had risen by 4% over the period, with young adults particularly affected. Cases rose by almost 20% among people in their 30s, and by 16% among those aged 20-29.
Rates of new obesity were seen to be 35% higher for people with the highest socioeconomic deprivation compared with people with the lowest socioeconomic deprivation, while there were significant geographical differences, with 48% of people affected by obesity in some areas of northeast England, compared with just 8.5% in the most affluent parts of London.
Angela, Professor at the University of Cambridge and Associate Director at the British Heart Foundation Data Science Centre, says:
“The COVID-19 pandemic has had a lasting impact on health and lifestyle behaviours. By analysing electronic health records from the entire adult population of England before, during, and after the pandemic, we have generated the most comprehensive evidence to date on how obesity risk and burden are increasingly diverging across multiple dimensions of inequality. These findings underscore the critical importance of secure access to whole-population health data to enable research, surveillance, and timely action to address widening health inequalities.”
The full study is published today in The Lancet.
