Lancet commission’s report calls for global shake-up and suggests looking at measures such as waist-to-height ratios and ill-health symptoms

• Reframing obesity may end the diagnosis debate, but the health challenges remain

Doctors are proposing a “radical overhaul” of how obesity is diagnosed worldwide amid concerns that a reliance on body mass index may be causing millions of people to be misdiagnosed.

More than 1 billion people are thought to be living with the condition that for decades has been diagnosed by measuring a person’s BMI (their ratio of height to weight) to estimate the amount of excess body fat they have.