Therapeutic patient education: A solution to the treatment of obesity and metabolic syndrome in psychiatry

Introduction/objectives Obesity and overweight are major public health issues. Obesity is a risk factor associated with many non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, certain types of cancers, musculoskeletal disorders and cardiovascular, dermatological or gastroenterological diseases. Patients with severe psychiatric disorders have a higher risk of developing overweight or obesity than the general population. The risk of obesity in schizophrenics patients can be multiplied by a factor ranging from 2.8 to 3.5. Patients suffering from mood disorder have sightly lower risk of obesity, however we still consider a factor ranging from 1.2 to 1.5. This significant weight gain can be partly explained by medication. Methods The hospital centre Le Vinatier, in France, has developed a therapeutic patient education program in helping patients to self-manage their preventable disease. In order to tackle the multifaceted nature of obesity, the program used the expertise of many different professionals: general practitioners, dieticians, dentists, physical adapted education teachers, pharmacists, nurses and so on. This programme is provided for patients suffering from obesity or an overweight complicated by diabetes, or/and metabolic syndrome, and/or history of cardiovascular diseases or/and a failure of a dietary monitoring. The program includes individual care and collective workshops in nutrition, oral heath, body image, adapted physical education, and roundtable. Results/conclusions A retrospective study has already shown that this therapeutic patient education program, like others before, presented better results than dietary consultations. A prospective study is currently being carried out to validate these results in the long term and to demonstrate the benefit associated to this program.