For several decades, a steady increase in the percentage of overweight and obese people has been observed all over the world. There are many studies available in the literature emphasizing the relationship of overweight and obesity with the occurrence of other diseases. The aim of this study is to characterize the prevalence of obesity and severe obesity, as well as their changes over time, among professionally active adults who underwent occupational medicine examinations in Poland in 2016−2020, for the POL-O-CARIA 2016−2020 study. In total, the results of 1,450,455 initial, control and periodic visits as part of the occupational medicine certificate were analyzed. Statistical calculations were performed with the use of IBM SPSS Statistics 25. In both groups (men/women), a significant decrease was observed every year for people who had normal body weight. In addition, the tendency to increase in people with I and III degrees of obesity was more strongly observed in the male group. A significant relationship was also observed between BMI categories and the occurrence of all analyzed comorbidities: hypertension, type 2 diabetes, lipid disorders and coronary artery disease (chi2 (70) = 12,228.11; p < 0.001). Detailed results showed that in the group of patients diagnosed with hypertension or lipid disorders, significant differences were observed between all groups; it turned out that as the BMI level increased (I, I, III), there was an increase in the percentage of occurrence of hypertension (38.1%, 41% and 45.3%, respectively) and type 2 diabetes (3.2%, 4.6% and 5.8%, respectively) (p < 0.001). Our analysis indicates that the prevalence of adult obesity and severe obesity will continue to increase nationwide, with an accompanying large increase in comorbidities.
Keywords: BMI index; cardiovascular diseases; obesity; professionally active adult population.