Obesity research, news and discussion thread

weatheriscool
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Deep brain stimulation promising against binge eating disorder
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-08- ... order.html
by University of Pennsylvania

A small device that detects food craving-related brain activity in a key brain region, and responds by electrically stimulating that region, has shown promise in a pilot clinical trial in two patients with loss-of-control binge eating disorder (BED), according to researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

The trial, described in a paper that appears today in Nature Medicine, followed the two patients for six months, during which the implanted device—of a type normally used to treat drug-resistant epilepsy—monitored activity in a brain region called the nucleus accumbens. The nucleus accumbens is involved in processing pleasure and reward, and has been implicated in addiction. Whenever the device sensed nucleus accumbens signals that had been found to predict food cravings in prior studies, it automatically stimulated that brain region, disrupting the craving-related signals. Over six months of treatment, the patients reported far fewer binge episodes, and lost weight.

"This was an early feasibility study in which we were primarily assessing safety, but certainly the robust clinical benefits these patients reported to us are really impressive and exciting," said study senior author Casey Halpern, MD, an associate professor of Neurosurgery and chief of Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery at Penn Medicine and the Corporal Michael J. Crescenz Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
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peekpok
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Re: Obestity research, news and discussion thread

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Deep brain stimulation seems like a miraculous technology but I've heard there are issues with the longevity of the implants.
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Insufficient insulin processing leads to obesity
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-09- ... esity.html
by University of Basel
Obesity increases the risk of an imbalance in sugar metabolism and even of diabetes. A research group at the University of Basel has now shown the opposite is true as well: deficits in the body's insulin production contribute to obesity.

Poor nutrition, too little movement and too many pounds on the scale—lifestyle influences the risk of metabolic diseases like diabetes. But the relationship works the other way around as well, as a research group led by Dr. Daniel Zeman-Meier of the university's Department of Biomedicine and the University Hospital of Basel reports. If insulin production is compromised, as is the case in the early stages of type 2 diabetes, this can contribute to obesity. The researchers report their findings in the journal Nature Communications.

The research team focused on protease PC1/3, a key enzyme in the body that transforms various inactive hormone precursors into the final, active forms. If this enzyme isn't functioning properly in a person, the result can be severe endocrine disorders. The consequences include a feeling of uncontrollable hunger and severe obesity.

"Until now, it was assumed that this dysregulation is caused by a lack of activation of satiety hormones," explains the study's leader, Dr. Zeman-Meier. "But when we turned off PC1/3 in the brains of mice, the animals' body weight did not change significantly." The researchers concluded from this that something other than a brain malfunction must be responsible.
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Scientists redefine obesity with discovery of two major subtypes
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-09- ... major.html
by Van Andel Research Institute

A team led by Van Andel Institute scientists has identified two distinct types of obesity with physiological and molecular differences that may have lifelong consequences for health, disease and response to medication.

The findings, published today in the journal Nature Metabolism, offer a more nuanced understanding of obesity than current definitions and may one day inform more precise ways to diagnose and treat obesity and associated metabolic disorders.

The study also reveals new details about the role of epigenetics and chance in health and provides insights into the link between insulin and obesity.

"Nearly 2 billion people worldwide are considered overweight and there are more than 600 million people with obesity, yet we have no framework for stratifying individuals according to their more precise disease etiologies," said J. Andrew Pospisilik, Ph.D., chair of Van Andel Institute's Department of Epigenetics and corresponding author of the study. "Using a purely data-driven approach, we see for the first time that there are at least two different metabolic subtypes of obesity, each with their own physiological and molecular features that influence health. Translating these findings into a clinically usable test could help doctors provide more precise care for patients."
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Scientists identify drug that mimics effects of exercise on muscle and bone
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-09- ... uscle.html
by Tokyo Medical and Dental University

Maintaining a regular workout routine can help you look and feel great—but did you know that exercise also helps maintain your muscles and bones? People who are unable to engage in physical activity experience weakening of the muscles and bones, a condition known as locomotor frailty. Recently, researchers in Japan have identified a new drug that may aid in the treatment of locomotor frailty by inducing similar effects as exercise.

Physical inactivity can result in a weakening of the muscles (known as sarcopenia) and bones (known as osteoporosis). Exercise dispels these frailties, increasing muscle strength and promoting bone formation while suppressing bone resorption. However, exercise therapy cannot be applied to all the clinical cases. Drug therapy may be helpful in treating sarcopenia and osteoporosis, especially when the patients have cerebrovascular disease, dementia or when they have already become bedridden. However, there is no single drug that addresses both issues simultaneously.
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Researcher discovers a muscle that can promote glucose and fat burning to fuel metabolism for hours while sitting

by Laurie Fickman, University of Houston
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-09- ... olism.html
From the same mind whose research propelled the notion that "sitting too much is not the same as exercising too little," comes a groundbreaking discovery set to turn a sedentary lifestyle on its ear: The soleus muscle in the calf, though only 1% of your body weight, can do big things to improve the metabolic health in the rest of your body if activated correctly.

And Marc Hamilton, professor of Health and Human Performance at the University of Houston, has discovered such an approach for optimal activation—he's pioneering the "soleus pushup" (SPU) which effectively elevates muscle metabolism for hours, even while one is sitting. The soleus, one of 600 muscles in the human body, is a posterior leg muscle that runs from just below the knee to the heel.

Published in the journal iScience, Hamilton's research suggests the soleus pushup's ability to sustain an elevated oxidative metabolism to improve the regulation of blood glucose is more effective than any popular methods currently touted as a solution including exercise, weight loss and intermittent fasting. Oxidative metabolism is the process by which oxygen is used to burn metabolites like blood glucose or fats, but it depends, in part, on the immediate energy needs of the muscle when it's working.

"We never dreamed that this muscle has this type of capacity. It's been inside our bodies all along, but no one ever investigated how to use it to optimize our health, until now," said Hamilton. "When activated correctly, the soleus muscle can raise local oxidative metabolism to high levels for hours, not just minutes, and does so by using a different fuel mixture."
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Scientists propose that obesity is a neurodevelopmental disorder
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-09- ... order.html
by Baylor College of Medicine
Obesity has increased rapidly in recent decades to affect more than 2 billion people, making it one of the largest contributors to poor health worldwide. Despite decades of research on diet and exercise treatments, many people continue to struggle to lose weight. Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and collaborating institutions now think they know why, and say we must shift the focus from obesity treatment to prevention.

The team reports in the journal Science Advances that molecular mechanisms of brain development during early life are likely a major determinant of obesity risk. Previous large studies in humans have hinted that genes that are most strongly associated with obesity are expressed in the developing brain. This current study in mice focused on epigenetic development. Epigenetics is a system of molecular bookmarking that determines which genes will, or will not, be used in different cell types.

"Decades of research in humans and animal models have shown that environmental influences during critical periods of development have a major long-term impact on health and disease," said corresponding author Dr. Robert Waterland, professor of pediatrics-nutrition and a member of the USDA Children's Nutrition Research Center at Baylor. "Body weight regulation is very sensitive to such 'developmental programming,' but exactly how this works remains unknown."

"In this study we focused on a brain region called the arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus, which is a master regulator of food intake, physical activity and metabolism," said first author Dr. Harry MacKay, who was a postdoctoral associate in the Waterland lab while working on the project. "We discovered that the arcuate nucleus undergoes extensive epigenetic maturation during early postnatal life. This period is also exquisitely sensitive to developmental programming of body weight regulation, suggesting that these effects could be a consequence of dysregulated epigenetic maturation."
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Major obesity advance takes out targeted fat depots anywhere in the body
By Nick Lavars
December 01, 2022
https://newatlas.com/medical/charged-na ... MAIL_ID%5D

The fat cells of an elite athlete can appear quite different to those in an obese subject, and technologies that make one function more like the other could unlock powerful new therapies for the condition. Scientists are reporting an exciting advance in this field, demonstrating how positively-charged nanomaterials can be injected into unhealthy fat to return it to a healthy state, laying the foundation for treatments that selectively target fat depots anywhere in the body.

Led by scientists at Columbia University, the research was published across two papers and centers on the different functions fat cells can take on in the human body, and the difference between healthy fat metabolism and unhealthy fat formation. Fat cells store energy in the form of lipids, but when they're tasked with taking on too much, they start to grow large and undergo changes to specific genes, ultimately leading to obesity.

The research team set out to remodel these fat cells rather than simply destroy them, and have found success using a positively charged nanomaterial called PAMAM generation 3 (P-G3). The scientists were inspired to deploy P-G3 against fat cells after finding that some fat tissue contains a negatively charged extracellular matrix (ECM), the support structure for the cells. This raised the possibility that the ECM could act as a transport system for positively charged molecules.

So, the team injected P-G3 into obese mice and indeed found that it spread rapidly throughout the fat tissue. They were surprised to find, however, that the nanomaterial had the effect of shutting down the lipid storage function of the fat cells, effectively returning them to a younger, healthier state. The mice lost weight as a result.

“With P-G3, fat cells can still be fat cells, but they can't grow up,” said study author Kam Leon. “Our studies highlight an unexpected strategy to treat visceral adiposity and suggest a new direction of exploring cationic nanomaterials for treating metabolic diseases.”
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Dozens of brain proteins may play a critical role in body weight regulation
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-04- ... tical.html
by Laval University
Genetic factors could contribute to up to 50%–75% of the variance in body mass index, or BMI, in the population.

By analyzing the genome of more than 800,000 people of European descent, a research team from Université Laval and the Quebec Heart and Lung Institute Research Center has identified 60 unique proteins expressed in the brain that may be critical regulators of body weight.

This study explored the link between genetic regions associated with body weight and the proteins expressed in the brain. "Previous study showed that hundreds of genetic regions influence body weight. In most cases, the function of these genes remains unknown. Our study reports that about 60 of these genes encode proteins that could influence body weight via their expression in the brain," says Éloi Gagnon, a doctoral student in clinical and biomedical sciences at the Université Laval Faculty of Medicine and first author of the study published in iScience.
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Study findings could pave the way for development of new strategies to prevent and treat obesity
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-04- ... esity.html
by University of Nottingham
New research has shown that weight loss, or bariatric, surgery can significantly alter the levels of bile acid associated with higher appetite, as can taking fiber supplements but to a lesser degree.

Bariatric surgery can be used as a treatment for people who are very obese and there are several types of surgery available, such as reducing the size of the stomach or rerouting the top part of the stomach to the small intestine. It's an invasive procedure but can lead to significant improvements in weight loss, metabolic health, and a reduction in appetite—though the reasons for this are unknown. Bile acids are a marker of poor cardiometabolic health that can affect liver function and inflammation.

A study, published today in Cell Reports Medicine by researchers from the University of Nottingham, King's College London and Amsterdam University Medical Center, has shed light on the molecules underlying the benefits of this kind of surgery on patient appetite and metabolism.

Researchers studied a group of patients in Amsterdam who had undergone bariatric surgery by measuring levels of bile acids before surgery and a year post-operation. They also studied bile acids from two population studies—TwinsUK, run by King's College London, and PREDICT, run by King's College London and nutrition company ZOE.

The study found that a specific bile acid called isoursodeoxycholate (isoUDCA), which is associated with higher appetite and worse metabolic levels, decreased after bariatric surgery and after taking fiber supplements. Levels of isoUDCA did not decrease after consuming omega-3 supplements.

Joint lead author Professor Ana Valdes from the University of Nottingham's School of Medicine said, "Bariatric surgery is not only extremely effective at helping people lose weight by reducing their appetite, but also improves their liver function and their metabolism."
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