Posts Tagged ‘genetics’

Confronting the inheritance of obesity really grates on people. It challenges a broad cultural bias that obesity is primarily a result of personal choices. The fact of obesity being a highly heritable trait is simply annoying to people who insist that strength of will can solve the problem. Regardless, scientists persist in exploring the genetic basis for […]

Genes play a profound role in shaping our bodies, as does the environment into which we are born. To date, more than 80 genetic variations have been linked to BMI and body fat distribution. Atul Chopra and colleagues at Baylor College of medicine are studying a defect in the FBN1 gene that can have a profound […]

While many people are still stuck on BMI and body size, basic research is building a deeper understanding of obesity as a systemic disease. At the European Society of Human Genetics last week, Taru Tukiainen presented another piece of the puzzle derived from the Genotype-Tissue Expression Project. Tukiainen and colleagues studied the relationship between BMI […]

New research is pointing to the possibility that gene therapy might eventually offer a cure for people with some forms of obesity. Publishing their research in Cell Reports, Akinori Takahashi and colleagues have found that by manipulating two genes in mice — Cnot7 and Tob — they could make mice burn more of their fat stores […]

The largest genetic map of obesity ever constructed promises to reveal much deeper insight into the very personal genetic inheritance of obesity. An international team of scientists have analyzed the genomes of more than a quarter million people. Some of the learning from this work is summarized by two papers published in Nature this week. This […]

Obesity headlines this past week have been filled with the revelation that birthdays after 1942 are unhappy birthdays if you’re concerned about the risk of obesity. The headlines go like this: Your Birth Year Could Influence Your Odds for Obesity Obesity Linked to Year of Birth Birth Year Affects Obesity Risk The Year You Were […]

New evidence of genes for obesity reminds us that a thin line separates reason from rationalization. Last week in Science, investigators led by Joseph Majzoub, chief of endocrinology at Boston Children’s Hospital, published their discovery of a gene mutation that may help explain how different people consuming precisely the same food can gain very different […]