Lipedema: Still a Little-Known Disease

Lipedema in its various clinical stages is a condition that almost exclusively affects the female sex and appears at puberty. The oedema does not respond to common low-calorie diets, nor to exercise, nor to common anti-oedema medical therapies, nor to bariatric surgery. In the more advanced clinical stages, it can induce more or less important functional impairments that induce physical disability, as well as psychological, relational, and social discomfort: pain, functional walking impotence, easy muscular fatigability, sleep-wake rhythm disturbances also linked to the state of anxiety and depression that affects subjects in whom, often, the response to the treatments they are directed towards is practically nil. Many epidemiological, aetiopathogenetic, diagnostic, and clinical aspects still need to be studied in depth, considering, moreover, that the disease was only recognized with its own specific code by the World Health Organization in the 11th edition of the International Classification of Diseases on 1 January 2022.