National trends and outcomes of morbidly obese women who underwent inpatient hysterectomy for benign gynecological disease in the USA

Introduction The US population has witnessed an epidemic expansion of obesity in the past several decades; nearly 50% of the population is projected to be obese by 2030 and 25% morbidly obese. This study examined trends, characteristics and outcomes of morbidly obese women who underwent benign hysterectomy. Material and methods This is a population‐based retrospective observational study querying the National Inpatient Sample from January 2012 to September 2015. The study population included 509 395 women who underwent hysterectomy for benign gynecological disease: 430 865 (84.6%) non‐obese women, 50 435 (9.9%) women with class I‐II obesity and 28 095 (5.5%) women with class III obesity. Main outcome measures were (i) cohort‐level trends of obesity and perioperative complications assessed by piecewise linear regression with log transformation and (ii) patient‐level perioperative complication risk by body habitus assessed with a generalized estimating equation after using a multiple‐group generalized boosted model. Results The rate of class III obesity increased by 40.4%, higher than the rate of class I‐II obesity (22.2%) (both, P