The study focused on a region of the brain that regulates food intake, physical activity and metabolism
Researchers say it’s possible that obesity could be prevented by dietary supplements prior to pregnancy, and that it should be treated as a neurodevelopmental disorder, according to their new study.
There are two billion people around the world who are overweight — and 650 million of those people are obese, the World Health Organization reported in 2016. With this study, researchers hoped to find ways to stop what they referred to as a worldwide epidemic. The study, published in the journal Scientific Advances, was conducted by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas along with other institutions.
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“The undeniable observation from the last several decades is that obesity treatment doesn’t work very well,” author Dr. Robert Waterland told the National Post. He is a professor of pediatrics-nutrition and a member of the USDA Children’s Nutrition Research Center at Baylor.
“Clearly we need a different approach,” he said.
The new approach, outlined in the study, is to treat obesity as a neurodevelopmental disorder — some of which have been successfully prevented with dietary supplements. For example, neural tube defects that occur in human fetuses have been prevented by augmenting folic acid in the diet.
“The data show very clearly that folic acid fortification of the food supply has been very effective in preventing this devastating developmental outcome of neural tube defects, which comprise things like spina bifida,” said Waterland.
“We need to take a similar approach with obesity because each individual’s body weight regulatory mechanism is largely based in the brain.”
The study, done on mice, focused on a region of the brain that regulates food intake, physical activity and metabolism called the arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus, said the study’s first author Dr. Harry MacKay. The researchers looked into epigenetics — “a system of molecular bookmarking that determines which genes will, or will not, be used in different cell types.”
The arcuate nucleus goes through epigenetic changes in a fetus and in early infancy that can later affect the programming of body weight regulation. Changes to that part of the brain could lead to significant weight gain later in life, although “exactly how this works remains unknown,” said Waterland.
Another factor that plays a part is maternal obesity.
“We already know that maternal obesity during pregnancy does promote obesity in her offspring,” said Waterland. “It’s likely that maternal obesity could interfere with this epigenetic development and we could see how that could end up leaving her child as somewhat ill-equipped to properly regulate food intake and energy expenditure.”
In a previous study also done on mice, Waterland said dietary supplements “prevented the transgenerational amplification of obesity” — which could be a solution.
The reason this study is of interest is because “we were able to show direct association with human genetics,” said Waterland.
As obesity remains a major public health challenge, the study concludes, researchers hope their work will invigorate efforts to understand developmental determinants of obesity risk.
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