Christina C Wee
Photo: Christina Wee
Elected 2012

Dr. Wee is Senior Deputy Editor at Annals of Internal Medicine and Vice President of the Annals Division of the American College of Physicians. Prior to joining Annals in 2019, Dr. Wee’s research focused on studying the barriers to care posed by obesity and the interplay of race, obesity, weight stigma, and patient preferences on the health outcomes and healthcare of persons with obesity. She established and led one of the most active health services clinical research programs in obesity. Dr. Wee’s research was the first to identify obese patients as a disenfranchised group within the healthcare delivery system and to bring this issue to national attention. She published a seminal paper in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2000 demonstrating that obese women were less likely to receive recommended cancer screening than thinner women despite their higher risk. She subsequently published a series of high profile studies in JAMA suggesting that clinicians nationally were not addressing obesity with their patients despite the epidemic rise of this condition. She was also the first to document that health disparities and healthcare cost associated with obesity varies across race and ethnicity. Dr. Wee used innovative approaches to her work. She used a novel adaptation of health utility methods to demonstrate that a third of obese primary care patients value modest weight loss and are willing to risk death to sustain even modest reductions in weight; moreover, obese patients on average value achieving substantial weight loss more that achieving "perfect health." Among her NIH funded studies including a multicenter study that focuses on understanding how patient preferences affect decisions to seek weight loss treatmente, first of its kind to measure patients’ value of weight loss prospectively using health utility methods.