health tricks 13

"A concern shared by both employers and employees is that time spent in the program attending the physician and dietitian visits, and the vigilance required to maintain lifestyle modifications, might diminish time and productivity on the job," said Jennifer Iyengar, M.D., the study's lead author and an endocrinology fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich. "However, we found that participation in our program was highly valued and had a positive impact at work." The total economic cost of obesity in the U.S. includes indirect costs, such as missed time from work, lost productivity at work and premature death due to obesity-related health problems, research shows. Iyengar said little is known, though, about whether weight loss interventions can improve the job performance and attendance of employees with obesity. She and her co-workers studied this question in participants in the University of Michigan Weight Management Program. The weight mana...

"What our research found is that low-birth weight and high-birth weight were both associated with the severity of liver disease, but in different ways," said Jeffrey Schwimmer, MD, professor of pediatrics at UC San Diego School of Medicine and director of the Fatty Liver Clinic at Rady Children's Hospital-San Diego. "Children with low-birth weight were more likely to develop severe scarring of the liver. However, children with high-birth weight were more likely to develop the hepatitis form of fatty liver disease." From the beginning of a child's life, low birth weight and high birth weight identify children who have increased risk for health-related issues, one being NAFLD. Birth weight involves both maternal and in utero factors, which may have long-lasting consequences for liver health. Schwimmer noted that early research indicated a relationship between low-birth weight and cardiovascular disease and diabetes. However, until now, there had been a l...

Due to the central role of liver in the whole body metabolism, fatty liver is a major health problem. In Finland alone, it affects around 1,000,000 people of the general population and has an occurrence of 90% among obese individuals. Humans with high liver fat content had less F. prausnitzii and more inflammation in the subcutaneous adipose tissue. The researchers, therefore, decided to study whether oral F. prausnitzii treatment would decrease hepatic fat content in high-fat fed mice that serve as a model for fatty liver. The results were very promising. Compared to the high-fat control mice, F. prausnitzii-treated mice had lower hepatic fat content, AST and ALT, as well as increased fatty-acid oxidation. In addition, hepatic lipidomic analyses revealed decreases in several species of triacylglycerols , phospholipids and cholesteryl esters. Expression of adiponectin, which is one of the main beneficial mediators of metabolism, was increased in the visceral adipose tissue. While ...

A steady rise in obesity in a patient population that has traditionally been underweight led Bincy Abraham, M.D., at Houston Methodist Hospital, to focus her research on two diseases seen as rising epidemics in the United States. Abraham's team published findings in  Inflammatory Bowel Diseases® (IBD Journal ), showing IBD patients who were also diagnosed with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease were older and lived with IBD longer. They also found patients with the combined IBD/NAFLD diagnosis had fewer metabolic risk factors than patients with NAFLD alone. Abraham's next step is to determine if there are factors associated with IBD that lead to the development of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. Abraham, director of the inflammatory bowel disease program at Houston Methodist Hospital, led a retrospective study of more than 400 of her patients separated into three groups -- 1) patients with both IBD and NAFLD; 2) patients with inflammatory bowel disease; and 3) patients wi...

In a commentary published in the  Journal of Cardiovascular Pharmacology and Therapeutics , the authors describe how being overweight and obesity contribute to metabolic syndrome, which affects 1 in 3 adults and about 40 percent of adults aged 40 and older. Clinicians have traditionally evaluated each of the major risk factors contributing to metabolic syndrome on an individual basis. There is evidence, however, that the risk factors are more than just the sum of their parts. "The major factor accelerating the pathway to metabolic syndrome is overweight and obesity," said Charles H. Hennekens, M.D., Dr.P.H., the first Sir Richard Doll Professor and senior academic advisor to the dean who senior authored the paper with Dawn H. Sherling, M.D., first author and an assistant professor of integrated medical science, and Parvathi Perumareddi, D.O., an assistant professor of integrated medical science, all faculty members in FAU's Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine. ...

Researchers from the University of Bath in the U.K. studied a group of overweight males. The volunteers walked for 60 minutes at 60 percent maximum oxygen consumption on an empty stomach and, on another occasion, two hours after consuming a high-calorie carbohydrate -rich breakfast. The research team took multiple blood samples after eating or fasting and after exercising. The researchers also collected adipose tissue samples immediately before and one hour after walking. Gene expression in the adipose tissue differed significantly in the two trials. The expression of two genes, PDK4 and HSL, increased when the men fasted and exercised and decreased when they ate before exercising. The rise in PDK4 likely indicates that stored fat was used to fuel metabolism during exercise instead of carbohydrates from the recent meal. HSL typically increases when adipose tissue uses stored energy to support increased activity, such as during exercise, explained Dylan Thompson, corresponding autho...

Atrial fibrillation is the most common heart rhythm disorder, with a 20% lifetime risk. It occurs most often in people over 60 years of age and increases the risk of stroke and heart failure. "Our research has previously shown that a large body size at age 20, and weight gain from age 20 to midlife, both independently increase the risk of atrial fibrillation in men," said author Professor Annika Rosengren, professor of internal medicine at the Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg , Sweden. "In this study we investigated the impact of body size on atrial fibrillation risk in women." The study included 1,522,358 women with a first pregnancy aged 28 years on average. Data on weight early in pregnancy, height, age, diabetes, hypertension and smoking were obtained from the Swedish Medical Birth Registry. Information on hospitalisation with atrial fibrillation was collected from the Swedish Inpatient Registry. Body surface area (BSA) in m 2  was calculate...

When you remove THADA, then the cells store more fat and produce less heat. When you restore THADA function, the cells store less fat and burn more energy," explains study co-author Aurelio Teleman of the German Cancer Research Center ( DKFZ ) in Heidelberg, Germany. "It's a metabolic regulator that affects the balance between how much energy your body turns into fat versus how much of it gets burned." When the researchers tested obese flies' response to cold by putting them in a walk-in refrigerator, they found that they were less able to cope. At near freezing temperatures, fruit flies "pass out," but when the researchers returned cold-immobilized flies to a warmer room, THADA knockout flies took longer to "wake up" than their wild-type counterparts. That result surprised study co-author Alexandra Moraru of DKFZ. "We suspected that fatter animals would have better insulation and be more resistant to the cold, but in this case, they ...

Their studies of the protein Id1 also show high levels reduce conversion of unhealthy white fat to a more energy burning beige. Their findings indicate the protein is a significant risk factor for diabetes and obesity and a molecular target to reverse both. "If we can target Id1, we may able to prevent these detrimental changes and ultimately reduce the risk of obesity and related disease," said Dr. Satya Ande, molecular biologist at the Georgia Cancer Center and Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University. Ande is corresponding author of the study in the journal  Diabetes . Ande's research team is now screening compounds to find ones that suppress Id1 and ideally also actively promote energy burning and conversion of white fat to beige. For the study, they generated a mouse that over-generated Id1 in fat cells. On a high-fat diet, these mice gained a lot more weight than their normal counterparts. They even gained more weight on a regular diet. The scienti...

While increasing body mass index (BMI), a measure of obesity, was associated with increased risk for high blood pressure in all four examined ethnic groups, the prevalence of high blood pressure was almost 6 times higher among obese Hispanic adolescents compared to normal weight Hispanics. Almost 25 percent of the Hispanic adolescents in the study were obese. Here is what the researchers found when they compared the prevalence of high blood pressure between obese and normal weight adolescents in the other ethnic groups: Obese white adolescents had an approximately fourfold increase; Obese Asian adolescents, though few, had an approximately threefold increase; Obese African-American adolescents had an approximately twofold increase. "We believe we are the first to compare adolescent blood pressures to body mass index in these four major ethnic/racial groups," said Joshua Samuels, M.D., M.P.H., the study's senior author, a professor in the Department of Pediatri...