Tag: obesity

Categories : Mental Health Metabolic DisordersTags :

Why Antipsychotic Drugs Cause Weight Gain

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A University of Pittsburgh study has discovered that the reason antipsychotic medications have weight gain as side effects is because the pancreas also produces and responds to dopamine.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter involved in mood regulation, pleasure and reward signalling. Many psychological disorders are thought to involve dopamine imbalances and are treated by medications designed to this end.
“There are dopamine theories of schizophrenia, drug addiction, depression and neurodegenerative disorders, and we are presenting a dopamine theory of metabolism,” said lead author Despoina Aslanoglou, PhD, at the University of Pittsburgh. “We’re seeing now that it is not only interesting to study dopamine in the brain, but it is equally interesting and important to study it in the periphery.”

Senior author Zachary Freyberg, MD, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry and cell biology at Pitt, observed that the dopamine theory is not as simple or as well understood as we would like to think.

“We still don’t really understand how dopamine signals biologically,” said Dr Freyberg. “Even decades after dopamine receptors have been discovered and cloned, we still deploy this ‘magical thinking’ approach: something happens that’s good enough. We use drugs that work on dopamine receptors, but how they intersect with this ‘magical system’ is even less understood.”

The researchers found that dopamine is not only produced in the brain but also in the alpha and beta cells of the pancreas, which secrete glucagon and insulin, respectively.

Alpha cells can produce their own dopamine with no precursors in response to glucose levels, while beta cells require an L-DOPA precursor. It may be possible that alpha cells secrete dopamine for their own receptors, while also supplying it to beta cells to suppress the release of insulin.

Surprisingly, the researchers also discovered that pancreatic dopamine can affect other receptors, such as noradrenaline and adrenaline.
At low concentrations, dopamine binds to D2-like dopamine receptors, blocking the release of glucagon or insulin. At high concentrations, dopamine binds to beta-adrenergic receptors, becoming stimulatory and pushing up glucagon levels while inhibiting insulin levels by blocking alpha-adrenergic receptors.

The study revealed how blocking inhibitory dopamine receptors causes an unchecked release of insulin and glucagon, leading to metabolic disorders and eventually, obesity and diabetes. This finding will help to formulate better drugs that target the dopamine system, reducing the effect on the pancreas.

Source: News-Medical.Net

Categories : Diet and Nutrition ExerciseTags : 1 Comment

Appetite Control With Semaglutide is a ‘Game Changer’ for Obesity

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Semaglutide, a drug normally used to treat type 2 diabetes promises to make a huge impact in the fight against obesity and the diseases associated with it.

A 15 month study involving over 2000 participants resulted in an average weight loss of 15kg for those taking the appetite suppressing drug.   
Speaking to the BBC, Jan, one of the participants in the trial, lost 28kg, which was over a fifth of her body weight. “The drug changed my life and completely altered my approach to food,” she said.

She said dieting had made her “miserable” but taking the drug was completely different as she was less hungry. 

However, that the trial has ended for Jan, her appetite has returned to normal and she is gaining weight. She said: “It felt effortless losing weight while on the trial, but now it has gone back to feeling like a constant battle with food.”

Recently approved by the FDA and European Medicines Agency, semaglutide is normally used to treat type 2 diabetes as an adjunct to diet and exercise, but the trial sought to establish its use in higher doses as an appetite suppressant. One group was given a weekly semaglutide injection while the other received a placebo, and dietary and lifestyle guidance was given to both groups with the aim of losing weight. 
The drug mimics GLP-1, a hormone that is released after a meal. The trial participants receiving semaglutide lost an average of 15kg compared to 2.6kg for  placebo, with 32% of participants receiving semaglutide losing a fifth of their body weight compared to 2% for placebo.

Side effects included nausea, diarrhoea, vomiting and constipation.
Prof Sir Stephen O’Rahilly, from the University of Cambridge, said: “The amount of weight loss achieved is greater than that seen with any licensed anti-obesity drug.

“This is the start of a new era for obesity drug development with the future direction being to achieve levels of weight loss comparable to semaglutide, while having fewer side-effects.”

Dr Duane Mellor, a dietician and from Aston Medical School, said: “It is useful to have a potential option to help people lose weight, however we need to acknowledge that weight loss will still need lifestyle change, and that any medication or change in lifestyle can bring potential risks and side-effects.

“So, it is always wise to speak to a health professional before trying to lose weight.”

Source: BBC News

Categories : Diet and Nutrition GastrointestinalTags :

Eating Saturated Fats can Cut Symptoms of Pancreatitis

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A study has found that symptoms of pancreatitis are less severe when foods with saturated fats are eaten.

The study, by researchers from Mayo Clinic, the Saint Louis University School of Medicine and the Washington University School of Medicine, examines the obesity paradox in which obese patients had better results when being treated for certain conditions, compared to non-obese patients.

Pancreatitis is the leading cause of hospitalisation from gastrointestinal disorders in the United States. It can have a variety of causes, such as gallstones, having abdominal surgery or overconsumption of alcohol.
Saturated fats are found in meat and dairy, while unsaturated fats are found in plants and fish, and in general consumption of unsaturated fats over saturated fats is encouraged as it is associated with reduced risk of heart disease and other conditions. However, exceptions such as the obesity paradox exist.

To delve into this question, the researchers examined 20 clinical reports from 11 countries, where fat intake in obese patients was monitored. They found that among obese patients who developed pancreatitis, those who ate a diet heavy in saturated fats had less severe symptoms than those who did not. 

To determine the cause of this protective effect, the researchers fed mice a diet rich in either saturated or unsaturated fats, and then induced pancreatitis in them. Those fed saturated fats developed less severe symptoms. On closer examination, they found that saturated fat did not interact well with pancreatic triglyceride lipase, reducing production of long-chain non-esterified fatty acids, which reduced the symptoms of pancreatitis.  

Source: Medical Xpress

Journal information: Biswajit Khatua et al. Adipose saturation reduces lipotoxic systemic inflammation and explains the obesity paradox, Science Advances (2021). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abd6449

Categories : Ageing Neurodegenerative DiseasesTags :

Obesity Adds to Alzheimer Severity

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In addition to it being a risk factor for many known chronic diseases, obesity is an additional burden on cerebral health and may also be associated with the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, according to a new study from the University of Sheffield and the University of Eastern Finland.  

The study used multimodal neural imaging and showed that obesity may contribute to the vulnerability of neural tissue, while maintaining a healthy weight helped to maintain brain structure in mid dementia Alzheimer’s disease.

Alzheimer’s disease is a neurodegenerative disease which accounts for two thirds of dementia in over 65s, is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States and there is no cure at present.  

Lead author Professor Annalena Venneri from the University of Sheffield’s Neuroscience Institute and NIHR Sheffield Biomedical Research Centre, said: “More than 50 million people are thought to be living with Alzheimer’s disease and despite decades of ground breaking studies and a huge global research effort we still don’t have a cure for this cruel disease.

“Prevention plays such an important role in the fight against the disease. It is important to stress this study does not show that obesity causes Alzheimer’s, but what it does show is that being overweight is an additional burden on brain health and it may exacerbate the disease.”

She added that it was important to educate people early on in their lives as it was too late to wait until the 60s to lose weight as the disease lurks in the backgrounds.

The researchers examined MRI scans of the brains of 47 patients diagnosed with mild Alzheimer’s disease dementia, 68 patients with mild cognitive impairment, and 57 individuals who were cognitively healthy. Using three complementary, computational techniques, they studied the brain’s anatomy, blood flow and also the brain’s fibres.

They compared gray matter volume, white matter integrity, cerebral blood flow and obesity. Grey matter volume decreases in Alzheimer’s. In patients with mild Alzheimer’s, an association was found with obesity and grey matter volume around the right temporoparietal junction, suggesting obesity creates a neural vulnerability in cognitively impaired patients. The study also found that maintaining a healthy weight may help preserve brain structure in structure in the presence of age and disease-related weight loss.

Joint author Dr Matteo De Marco from the University of Sheffield’s Neuroscience Institute, said: “Weight-loss is commonly one of the first symptoms in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease as people forget to eat or begin to snack on easy-to-grab foods like biscuits or crisps, in place of more nutritional meals.

“We found that maintaining a healthy weight could help preserve brain structure in people who are already experiencing mild Alzheimer’s disease dementia. Unlike other diseases such as cardiovascular disease or diabetes, people don’t often think about the importance of nutrition in relation to neurological conditions, but these findings show it can help to preserve brain structure.”

Source: Medical Xpress

Journal information: Manmohi D. Dake et al, Obesity and Brain Vulnerability in Normal and Abnormal Aging: A Multimodal MRI Study, Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease Reports (2021). DOI: 10.3233/ADR-200267

Categories : Cardiovascular Disease ExerciseTags :

Large Study Casts Doubt on “Fat but Fit”

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New Spanish research casts doubt on the “fat but fit” paradox, where it is thought that physical fitness is enough to eliminate cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk.

Overweight and obesity is a worldwide problem that is greatly contributing to the burden of noncommunicable diseases, including CVD. A high body mass index (BMI) is strongly associated with CVD risk factors, such as hypercholesterolaemia, hypertension and diabetes. The cardiovascular complications arising from overweight and obesity are driven by processes such as inflammation, insulin resistance, endothelial dysfunction, coronary calcification. Some evidence suggested that physical activity was cardioprotective, partly or completely eliminating the CVD risk from disease – the “fat but fit” paradox.

A recent meta-analysis showed that cardiovascular fitness was a better predictor of cardiovascular disease over overweight/obesity, suggesting that perhaps public health programmes should emphasise fitness over control of body weight. To this end, the researchers sought to confirm if the “fat but fit” paradox was real.

The researchers gathered data from workers’ health insurance, with participants aged 18-64 grouped into normal weight, overweight and obesity by BMI, and into regularly active ( >150 min moderate physical activity or equivalent per week), insufficiently active (less than regularly active) and inactive (no physical activity at all). They were further separated by age, sex, smoking status and residential address.

Approximately 42%, 41%, and 18% of participants had normal weight, overweight, or obesity, respectively; 63.5%, 12.3%, and 24.2% were inactive, insufficiently active, and regularly active; and 30%, 15%, and 3% had hypercholesterolaemia, hypertension, and diabetes.

However, the protective effect of physical activity was far less than the excess risk from overweight/obesity. So much so that even regularly active obese participants had two to five-fold risk increases over their inactive but normal weight peers in the risk factors.

The protective effect of physical activity in overweight/obesity remains controversial. Shortcomings of the study were that they did not control for diet, and only accounted for self-reported leisure time activities. However, the large study size, with over 500 000 participants, should put paid to the theory that a physically active lifestyle can completely eliminate the deleterious effects of overweight/obesity.

The researchers concluded that, “weight loss per se should remain a primary target for health policies aimed at reducing CVD risk in people with overweight/obesity.”

Journal article source: European Journal of Protective Cardiology

Journal information: Pedro L Valenzuela, et al., Joint association of physical activity and body mass index with cardiovascular risk: a nationwide population-based cross-sectional study, European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, 2021;, zwaa151, https://doi.org/10.1093/eurjpc/zwaa151

Categories : Diet and Nutrition ExerciseTags :

Poor Diet is an Important Factor of Childhood Obesity

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A Baylor University study has shown that market-bought food in addition to the traditional diet reliably predicted obesity in Amazonian children, a result that has important insights into the global childhood obesity epidemic.

Globally, 6% of girls and 8% of boys in 2016 were obese, compared to 1% in 1975. In South Africa, 13% of children under the age of five are obese.

“The importance of a poor diet versus low energy expenditure on the development of childhood obesity remains unclear,” said lead author Samuel Urlacher, PhD, of Baylor University. “Using gold-standard measures of energy expenditure, we show that relatively lean, rural forager-horticulturalist children in the Amazon spend approximately the same total number of calories each day as their much fatter peri-urban counterparts and, notably, even the same number of calories each day as children living in the industrialised United States.”

Factors such as income and access to running water were used to establish market integration. Children’s physical activity was measured with wearable devices and immune activity by measuring biomarkers obtained from minimally invasive finger-prick blood samples. Most importantly, children’s daily energy expenditure was measured with the “doubly labeled water” stable isotope-tracking method and children’s resting energy expenditure using respirometry. These are both participant-friendly, gold-standard techniques.

A third of peri-urban children were overweight, while zero rural children were, and peri-urban children on average had 65% more body fat than rural children. Peri-urban and rural children had similar levels of physical activity, and market integration, immune activity and physical activity had no effect on expenditure between rural and peri-urban children’s energy expenditure, in common with previous studies. Compared to rural children, peri-urban children spent 108 less calories while at rest, which is thought to be due to lower immune activity. Most importantly, variation in market foods was related to children’s level of body fat.

“Our findings are in line with a growing body of research pointing toward poor diet being the most important factor underlying the development of childhood obesity,” Urlacher said. “Exercise is absolutely still a critical part of this equation and is essential for living a healthy life, but diet increasingly appears to be most directly related to children’s adiposity and long-term energy balance.”

The researchers plan to follow the children longitudinally to record any development obesity and cardiovascular problems.

Source: News-Medical.Net

Categories : COVID Diseases, Syndromes and ConditionsTags :

Weight Link to COVID Risk Emphasised by CDC

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the US has included in its coronavirus risk warning people who are considered overweight (a BMI of 25 to 29.9, obese is above 30).

Dr Donald Hensrud, director of the Mayo Clinic Healthy Living Program, explained that obesity already is associated with several complications – diabetes, high blood pressure, dyslipidaemia and cardiovascular disease.

Dr Hensrud said, “Now COVID-19 comes along, and we’ve got all the issues we had before plus some additional ones. Obesity is associated with low-grade inflammation and an effect on our immune system. This affects our susceptibility to COVID-19. People who are obese are more likely to develop COVID-19 and complications from it, including dying, than people who aren’t obese. In addition, people with diabetes and some of the other complications from obesity are also at increased risk. So obesity and its complications independently take the risks of COVID-19 and elevate them significantly.”

Dr Hensrud said that he noted patients of his had put on weight during lockdown due to comfort eating and staying at home without any exercise. In order to reduce their risk, people should resolve to eat a healthy diet and engage in exercise, although he cautioned that losing more than 10% body weight in six months can impact the immune system.

Source: Medical Xpress