As we ring in the new year, we would like to call attention to two ongoing awareness campaigns in the world of metabolic health. The United Kingdom has designated this Obesity Awareness Week, and January is Thyroid Awareness Month, with both campaigns seeking to raise awareness of both prevention and treatment in their overlapping therapeutic areas.
Obesity is a common condition throughout the world, but it is often misperceived and stigmatized as solely arising from poor lifestyle choices. While diet and exercise can help prevent or reduce the risk of obesity for some patients, understanding it as a disease is important to diagnosing any comorbidities, learning the relevant risk factors, and determining treatments. For example, since thyroid irregularities can lead to changes in appetite and weight, obesity can co-occur with both hypothyroidism and hyperthyroidism
The Patient Perspective
Obesity is often a chronic condition, and its negative physical impacts can compound over time, making movement and other daily activities more difficult. Aside from the direct effects of weighing more, obesity also increases the risk of cardiovascular and endocrine conditions (among others). Stigma can compound these issues, making it difficult understand obesity as a disease and seek treatment accordingly.
Let’s listen to a 51- to 55-year-old woman describe her experience with obesity and the social and physical challenges she faces.
Decoding the Patient Voice
Understanding the patient voice is at the heart of what we do at inVibe, which we approach holistically by analyzing what is said, how it’s said, and how it sounds.
Let us look first at what this patient is saying. The patient starts with social impacts, moves briefly into the physical effects, then returns to interpersonal troubles that can come from obesity, which underscores that the judgment she perceives from other people is the most keenly-felt aspect of her condition.
The way that the patient goes through the list is also worth some scrutiny. When listing both physical and social symptoms of obesity, the patient trails off and labels the consequences as “various/a lot of things.” This tracks both with her feeling resigned to these effects and the specific problems obesity brings about being too many to name.
This resignation is confirmed when we take our acoustic approach to this data, where we see negative emotionality (‘valence’) and low enthusiasm (‘activation’) throughout her description of obesity. These signals corroborate what you can likely already hear - a depressed-sounding affect in this patient’s speech.
By taking these perspectives into account, we can draw out some of the most important parts of the patient experience with obesity: a chronic, cumulative physical burden which is difficult to disentangle from the interpersonal impacts of the disease. Whether these patients are possible treatment users or potential enrollees in a clinical trial, manufacturers need to be able to address this complexity in order to properly help obesity patients.
Simple, Systematic, Scalable
Our Listening Platform makes it simple for patients to speak with us about their experiences in an open and authentic way and easy for you to engage with their perspectives directly.
If you’re interested in hearing from more patients like this one so that you can gain insight into their experiences, beliefs, behaviors, and desires, schedule a demo with us today and see for yourself.
