Tuesday, December 25, 2012
Genetic Link to Childhood Obesity
According to a new study, children born with a known as a copy number variation (), are genetically susceptible to developing.
Previous research with adult test subjects revealed that CNVs are associated with many inherited human diseases, including extreme.
With this study, researchers “wanted to complement these earlier studies and address CNVs in common childhood obesity by examining children in the upper 5th percentile of BMI but excluding subjects with the most severe obesity since they often have other serious medical conditions that can be confounding,” says co-author Dr. Hakon Hakonarson.
Their Findings
The researchers identified multiple deletion and duplication CNVs that are likely to contribute to genetic susceptibility of common childhood obesity in subjects of European and African ancestry.
What This Means To You
At this point, it doesn’t mean a whole lot.
According to study author Dr. Struan Grant, ”Further functional studies will be needed to fully characterize the function of the genes at these loci in relation to childhood obesity.
In other words, a lot more research needs to be done to:
- Prove a genetic cause of childhood obesity, and
- Develop a treatment
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