~tasha~
Age: 124
Total Posts: 47628
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United Kingdom, United Kingdom
Some of you still on last year's resolution,do not despair,
Blame it on your genes
Scientists hope the discovery of a genetic link to obesity will lead to new
ways to battle the growing health problem.
SCIENTISTS have discovered the clearest link yet between genes and obesity,
in a study that opens the way to explaining why some people seem destined to
put on weight while others remain slim.
Researchers found the gene – called FTO – by studying nearly 39,000 white
Europeans in a finding they hope can lead to new ways to fight the growing
global health problem.
British researchers, writing in the journal Science, said the presence of
FTO increased a person’s risk for obesity. In the study, 63% of those
sampled had a copy or more of the gene or its variant.
People with two copies had a 70% higher risk of being obese than people with
none. They were also an average of nearly 3kg heavier than a similar person
with no such genes.
Those with one copy of the gene had a lesser but still elevated risk of
obesity.
“Our findings suggest a possible answer to someone who might ask, ‘I eat the
same and do as much exercise as my friend next door, so why am I fatter?’,”
said Professor Andrew Hattersley of the Peninsula Medical School in Exeter,
Britain, and a co-author of the study.
“There is clearly a component to obesity that is genetic.”
Genetics has long been assumed to play a role in making some people fatter
than others, and previous research has tentatively implicated specific
genes.
However, the researchers emphasised, genetics alone cannot account fully for
a worldwide surge in obesity in recent decades that experts attribute to
millions of people eating too much of the wrong foods and getting too little
exercise.
Researchers led by Prof Hattersley and Prof Mark McCarthy of the University
of Oxford examined the genetics of nearly 39,000 children and adults from
Britain, Finland and Italy.
They found 47% had one copy of the FTO gene variant, and 16% had two copies.
The gene’s effect was seen by the age of seven, they said.
“Although this is the first gene that has been found that plays this kind of
role,” McCarthy said, “this is not the whole story.”
He said that while extra body fat can be attributed to the presence of the
gene variant, this gene alone will not explain why some people are, for
example, 50kg heavier than other people living in similar conditions in the
same place.
The researchers said they do not know how the gene works and what it
actually does to predispose people to obesity, but they hope knowledge of
the gene’s role can lead to new ways of treating and preventing obesity.
The next step, they said, is to examine FTO in more diverse populations
including, for example, South Asians and blacks.
Obesity is recognised as a growing public health problem worldwide. Obese
people are at greater risk of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, high blood
pressure and some cancers.
The World Health Organisation estimated that 1.6 billion adults worldwide
are overweight and at least 400 million adults are obese, according to the
UN agency’s definitions.
It projected that, by 2015, there will be about 2.3 billion overweight
adults and more than 700 million obese adults.
Once seen as a problem exclusive in high-income countries, obesity is now on
the rise in low- and middle-income countries, particularly in urban areas,
the agency said. – Agencies
