Obesity
Weight gain no big deal in type 1 diabetes: study
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Becoming overweight or obese may not be so bad for people who are battling type 1 diabetes, the less common form of the disease, researchers said on Friday.
People who put on weight over time were less likely to die than others studied, and those classified as underweight were at the greatest risk for death, according to the study.
Even people who were technically obese were less likely to die if they had type 1 diabetes, the team at the University of Pittsburgh found.
Teen obesity tied to death risks in middle-age
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Obese teenagers are more likely than their thinner peers to die of heart disease or certain other ills by the time they are middle-aged, a large study suggests.
Researchers found that among more than 200,000 Norwegians followed from adolescence to middle-age, those who were obese or overweight as teens were three to four times as likely to have died of heart disease.
Similarly, their risks of death from colon cancer or respiratory diseases, such as asthma and emphysema, were two to three times that of adults who had been thinner as teenagers. They were also more likely to have died suddenly.
Thinness vs. obesity not directly linked to eating habits, study suggests
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Whether you are fat or thin isn’t directly determined by your eating habits, suggest researchers who report new findings made in worms in the June issue of Cell Metabolism, a publication of Cell Press. While both feeding and fat in worms depends on serotonin levels in the nervous system, they found evidence that the nerve messenger acts through independent channels to control whether you eat versus what to do with those calories once you’ve eaten them.
“It says that the nervous system is a key regulator coordinating all energy-related processes through distinct molecular pathways,” said Kaveh Ashrafi of the University of California, San Francisco. “The nervous system makes a decision about its state leading to effects on behavior, reproduction, growth and metabolism. These outputs are related, but they are not consequences of each other. It’s not that feeding isn’t important, but the neural control of fat is distinct from feeding.”
If the results in worms can be extrapolated to humans, as Ashrafi suspects at a fundamental level they can given serotonin’s ancient evolutionary origins, then the finding may have clinical implications.
Obesity tough on the knees, and men’s hips
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Obesity raises the risk of severe knee arthritis and may do similar damage in the hips, but perhaps only in men, a new study suggests.
Researchers found that among nearly 2,600 older Icelandic adults, those who were overweight were more likely to have had a total knee replacement due to severe arthritis. Obese men and women were particularly at risk.
When it came to the odds of total hip replacement, obese men were again at greater risk. However, weight was not a factor for women, the researchers report in the Annals of Rheumatic Diseases.
Mood hormone may affect fat, U.S. study finds
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A brain chemical strongly linked to mood and appetite may also directly affect fat gain, U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday.
They said levels of serotonin, the nerve-signaling chemical targeted by many antidepressants, may also direct the body to put down fat regardless of how much food is eaten.
“It may be one reason diets fail,” metabolism expert Kaveh Ashrafi of the University of California, San Francisco, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.
Kids’ obesity rates may be stabilizing, data hint
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After years of bad news about skyrocketing numbers of overweight and obese children and adolescents, new data released today indicate that there has been no significant increase in the prevalence of obese children and teens in the United States in recent years.
“In the United States, the prevalence of overweight among children and adolescents increased between 1980 and 2004, and the heaviest children have been getting heavier,” note Dr. Cynthia L. Ogden, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Hyattsville, Maryland and colleagues in this week’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
To gauge the latest trends, they analyzed height and weight measurements obtained from 8,165 children and adolescents as part of the 2003-2004 and 2005-2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), which are nationally representative surveys of the U.S. population.
Low-carb diets work for overweight diabetics
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Overweight people with type 2 diabetes can keep their weight and blood sugar under control over the long term by following a low-carbohydrate diet, Swedish researchers report.
“It is indeed possible to have a lasting success in the treatment of some of these patients,” Dr. Jorgen Vesti Nielsen told Reuters Health.
The participants in the study limited their carbohydrate intake to 20 percent of total calories. The most significant effect of this low-carb diet is the absence of hunger, Nielsen added.
Overweight Men at Risk of Osteoarthritis of Both Hip and Knee
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Men who are overweight or obese are much more likely need a hip replacement for osteoarthritis than men who are of normal weight, finds research published online ahead of print in Annals of Rheumatic Diseases.
People who are overweight are known to be more likely to get osteoarthritis of the knee, but this is the first study to show that being overweight is a risk factor for hip osteoarthritis in men but not women.
Researchers compared the body mass indexes of 1,473 Icelandic people who had undergone hip or knee replacement with those of 1,103 people who had not had joint replacement surgery. All were born between 1910 and 1939.
Less TV, more breakfast helps teens keep weight off
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Eating breakfast, skipping snacks and cutting down on TV and computer time may help adolescents maintain a healthy weight after being treated for obesity, new research from France shows.
Teens who adopted these habits—and ate fewer calories while getting more of their energy from protein—were more likely to have kept the weight off two years after the conclusion of a weight-reduction program, Dr. Marie Francoise Rolland-Cachera of the University of Paris and colleagues found.
While certain behavior strategies are known to help formerly obese adults stay slim, such as monitoring one’s weight and food intake, less is known about the characteristics that distinguish adolescents who lose weight and keep it off, the researchers note.
Weight, lifestyle factors tied to urinary symptoms
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Adults who are obese or have less-than-ideal lifestyle habits may be more likely to have multiple, and more severe, urinary problems, new research suggests.
In a study of more than 5,500 men and women ages 30 to 79, researchers found that three-quarters of women and two-thirds of men reported at least one urinary tract symptoms—such as frequent trips to the bathroom overnight, difficulty emptying the bladder and urinary incontinence.
Obese adults were more likely than their normal-weight counterparts to have multiple, more severe symptoms. Smoking, lack of exercise and heavy drinking were also linked to more serious urinary problems.
Medicare may broaden obesity surgery payment
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The U.S. Medicare program may expand reimbursement for bariatric surgery for the obese, in light of a study that found the treatment can help reverse diabetes, the agency said on Monday.
Recent research found the surgery can completely reverse type 2 diabetes, a metabolic condition spurred by weight gain and suffered by millions of Americans.
Medicare, the government health plan for the nation’s 44 million elderly, “will assess the nature of the scientific evidence supporting surgery for the treatment of diabetes,” the agency said on its Web site.
Obesity contributes to global warming: study
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Obesity contributes to global warming, too.
Obese and overweight people require more fuel to transport them and the food they eat, and the problem will worsen as the population literally swells in size, a team at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine says.
This adds to food shortages and higher energy prices, the school’s researchers Phil Edwards and Ian Roberts wrote in the journal Lancet on Friday.
Obesity tied to risk of psychiatric disorders
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Obesity is a well known risk factor for certain physical health problems, but a new study suggests that heavy adults also have higher rates of psychiatric disorders.
Using data from a national health survey of more than 40,000 Americans, researchers found that obese adults were up to twice as likely to suffer from depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions as normal-weight adults.
In addition, even moderately overweight people had elevated rates of anxiety disorders, the study found.
Tackle obesity like smoking: researcher
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Tackling the global obesity epidemic will require governments to take similar action to that many used to curb smoking, a top researcher said on Wednesday.
This could include regulations that restrict how companies market “junk” food to children and requirements for schools to serve healthy meals, said Professor Boyd Swinburn, a public health researcher who works with the World Health Organisation.
“The brakes on the obesity epidemic need to be policy-led and governments need to take centre stage,” Swinburn, a researcher at Deakin University in Australia, told Reuters at the 2008 European Congress on Obesity.
US obesity rates alarmingly high; hard on the heart
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New research shows “alarming levels” of obesity in most ethnic groups in the United States, principal investigator Dr. Gregory L. Burke, of Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina told Reuters Health. The study also confirms the potentially deadly toll obesity exacts on the heart and blood vessels.
“The obesity epidemic has the potential to reduce further gains in U.S. life expectancy, largely through an effect on cardiovascular disease mortality (death),” Burke and colleagues warn in the latest issue of Archives of Internal Medicine.
Among 6,814 middle-age or older adults participating in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis, or “MESA” study, researchers found that more than two thirds of white, African American and Hispanic participants were overweight and one third to one half were obese.
