Smoking " pack years " concept for obesity?

A team of researchers from Australia, diagnosis Denmark and Indonesia have come up with the suggestion that obesity should be measured in "obese years" or "BMI years", here analogous to the " pack years " concept used for smoking.  Up to now obesity has been measured internationally only by the severity of the problem and not its duration.  To do the latter would be much more meaningful because examining the association between obesity and the risk of mortality, nurse by considering only its severity and ignoring its duration, may have underestimated the adverse effects of the current epidemic [source: International Journal of Epidemiology]