To investigate the associations between obesity and self-rated health and psychological well-being in Spanish women.

Cross-sectional study. Three dependent variables were defined: self-rated health; self-declared diagnosis of psychiatric disorders or use of psychiatric drugs; and General Health Questionnaire-12 (GHQ-12) score. A set of variables (sociodemographic, morbidity and lifestyle) were used to adjust for possible confounding effects.

The National Health Survey was conducted in Spain in 2006.

A total of 15 099 women aged ≥18 years. Participants were classified into groups according to their BMI.

In all, 55·4 % of the women had normal weight, 29·4 % were overweight and 15·2 % were obese. Self-perception of poor health in obese women was 57·8 %, a significantly higher value than in women of normal weight (28·8 %). Prevalence of psychiatric disease was 35·5 % in obese women and 18·9 % in women of normal weight. In multivariate analysis, obese women had 34 % higher odds of declaring poor self-perception of health (OR = 1·34; 95 % CI 1·12, 1·61), 18 % higher odds of self-reporting psychiatric disease (OR = 1·18; 95 % CI 1·02, 1·38) and 26 % higher odds (OR = 1·26; 95 % CI 1·02, 1·55) of having an abnormal outcome (≥3) on the GHQ-12 than women of normal weight.

The present study highlights that obese Spanish women have worse self-rated health and psychological health than those with normal weight. These aspects are relevant because of the growing importance placed on the functionality of patients and their mental health within the obesity epidemic.

To examine the overall morbidity of patients who underwent surgery for congenital cardiac defect during childhood.

A congenital cardiac defect treated with surgery is seldom totally cured. The incidence of residua, sequelae, and comorbidity is quite high. The morbidity has not been thoroughly examined.

Medication was used as an indicator of morbidity. Data from the Finnish Research Registry of Paediatric Cardiac Surgery were linked to data from the medication registry of Finland’s Social Insurance Institution. This study includes 5116 patients with a mean age of 33.5 (ranged from 14.7 to 64.8) years, who had undergone surgery for congenital cardiac defect between 1953 and 1989. The use of medicines among patients in 2004 was compared with 10232 age- and sex-matched control subjects.

The overall use of medicines was frequent; 62% of patients and 53% of controls had purchased at least one prescribed medicine (risk ratio: 1.2, 95% confidence interval: 1.1–1.2). The number of patients using cardiovascular medicines (17%) and anti-thrombotic agents (5%) was higher than that of control subjects (risk ratio: 2.2 and 8.4). In addition, the patients needed medicinal care for epilepsy (3%), asthma (7%), and psychiatric diseases (10%) more often than did controls (risk ratio: 2.2, 1.5, and 1.3, respectively).

Patients operated on for congenital cardiac defect had more chronic diseases and used more medicines than did controls.