Elena Christofides, MD, explains how documenting symptoms, medical records, metabolic health, and lifestyle changes can help patients seek an evaluation for acquired hypothalamic obesity.
Transcript
So the three things a patient needs to do if they believe they have acquired hypothalamic obesity is number one: “Start a calendar of events that you can relate, the changes that you’ve seen, and whatever injury or event you think might have triggered this situation.
Start documenting it as thoroughly as possible and start acquiring proof of those changes. Photos. Food diaries. Exercise information, like maybe you go to a gym or you have a trainer and you can document what you were doing. The first thing is to document the story of how you got to this point.
The second aspect is to make sure that you capture all of the medical information that you have and that you can. So if you’ve had MRIs, get those. If you’ve had CT scans, get those. Even if they’re not that good for the brain, it’s still imaging. Don’t get the images, though. Just bring us the reports.”
The number of people who actually read their own scans is negligible. But also, we all have digital systems now. We’re all on electronic medical records, and we don’t have a way of viewing CDs anymore or viewing films or viewing scans. I don’t have any machines that it can do that.
“So, often the report is enough to begin with, and then any labs that you can get, every lab you can get related to metabolic health, like hemoglobin A1cs, cholesterol panels, etc. As part of your calendar events and your medical history that you’re acquiring, make sure you’re documenting your blood pressure, your heart rate, your weight, and your BMI if you can. Also, your body fat analysis.
There are many places in the country where, like, at a gym or some sort of metabolic health facility, they can do scans to give you your body fat analysis or give you your body composition analysis. And that would be fantastic if you have those as well, especially if you can do them, say, a month or 2 or 3 apart where you can see the progression.
So you have that documented because it may take you a while to find a specialist. And so if you have 2 or 3 body scans that show this progression while you’re documenting lifestyle interventions, that goes a long way to proving your case.
So keep a food diary, keep an exercise diary, keep a journal, keep logging all the lifestyle things you are doing while simultaneously documenting the deterioration of your health. Having the timeline to show that.
And then you need to make a concerted effort to find an expert in obesity, preferably an endocrinologist, preferably someone who has experience with hypothalamic obesity, because once you show up with that sort of, you know, binder of information, it will be much easier conversation and much easier for your physician or your provider to be able to see that story and understand where the next steps need to be to evaluate you and get you the help that you need.”
