healthcare thinking 19

The study looked at 10,186 children across the country, both those born at term and those born prematurely. The children born with high birthweight at term were more likely to be obese by kindergarten than their average-weight counterparts. A similar finding held true in the children born prematurely, starting in first grade. "Infants born with higher birthweight appeared to be at risk from a young age," said researcher Sarah Miller. "These children may benefit from early attention." Childhood Obesity Children born with a large birthweight (above 10 pounds at term) were 69 percent more likely than average weight children to be obese by kindergarten and continuing at least through second grade, the researchers determined. By second grade, the last grade examined, 23.1 percent of children born with high birthweight were obese. In comparison, children born at the expected weight had an obesity rate of only 14.2 percent by second grade. Of the premature infant...

"The study results suggest that early intervention with women to attain healthy weights before they become pregnant is critical to their health and the health of their future children," commented senior investigator Barbara Abrams, DrPH, of the Division of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 15 out of every 100 women of childbearing age are severely obese. Recent studies have linked high maternal weight, before and during pregnancy, to child behavior and particularly to problems such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Some evidence also points to a possible link with internalizing problems, such as depression. These problems can have negative effects on school performance and relationships with others. Researchers used the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) to investigate whether maternal pre-pregnancy body-mass index (BMI) is associated ...

Tea with sweetener in a spoon (inventory picture). Credit score: © photosiber / Fotolia Synthetic sweeteners could also be related to long-term weight acquire and elevated threat of weight problems, diabetes, hypertension and coronary heart illness, in accordance with a brand new research printed in  CMAJ (Canadian Medical Affiliation Journal) Consumption of synthetic sweeteners, resembling aspartame and sucralose, is widespread and rising. Rising knowledge point out that synthetic, or nonnutritive, sweeteners might have adverse results on metabolism, intestine micro organism and urge for food, though the proof is conflicting. To raised perceive whether or not consuming synthetic sweeteners is related to adverse long-term results on weight and coronary heart illness, researchers from the College of Manitoba's George & Fay Yee Centre for Healthcare Innovation performed a scientific evaluation of 37 research that adopted over 400,000 individuals for a ...

In prior studies of the impact of a plant-based diet, there were several limitations. Plant-based diets were defined as " vegetarian " which consist of a variety of dietary patterns that exclude some or all animal foods. These studies treat all plant foods equally, even though certain plant foods like refined grains and sugar sweetened beverages are associated with a higher risk of cardio-metabolic disease. To overcome these limitations, the researchers created three versions of a plant-based diet: an overall plant-based diet which emphasized the consumption of all plant food and reduced (but did not eliminate) animal food intake; a healthful plant-based diet that emphasized the intake of healthy plant foods such as whole grains, fruits and vegetables; and an unhealthful plant-based diet which emphasized consumption of less healthy plant foods such as refined grains. Researchers used a baseline sample of 73,710 women from the Nurses' Health Study, 92,320 women from ...

Kimberley Steele MD PhD, Principal Investigator and Director of Bariatric Research at Hopkins, was inspired to investigate this phenomenon after observing that her gastric bypass patients had a heightened sensitivity to sweet foods after surgery. Dr. Steele and her team of neuroscientists and imaging specialists hypothesized that the factors responsible for variation in weight loss following bariatric surgery may lie not just in the gut but also in the brain. Dr. Steele's team studied taste preferences for sugars and fats in patients prior to surgery and up to 3 months after Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB) or vertical sleeve gastrectomy (VSG). While both RYGB and VSG procedures reduce the size of the stomach, RYGB also reroutes the progression of food through the intestines. Thus it alters many of the gut responses that would usually be triggered during digestion. Their preliminary data show that all patients experienced a decrease in their liking of sweet taste, but a more pro...

The study conducted by Christina Estrada, a doctoral candidate in the UC psychology graduate program in the laboratory of Matia Solomon, PhD, an Associate Professor in the UC Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience, used surgically-induced menopause to cause obesity in rats and identified brain areas that benefit from estrogen replacement. The findings will be presented this week at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB). "We know as women age and enter into menopause, they tend to gain body weight and body fat, particularly in the abdominal or 'belly' area. Excess abdominal fat greatly increases risk for cardio-metabolic diseases," says Solomon. "While there are likely many factors that are associated with these risks in menopausal women, estrogen loss is associated with body weight and fat gain during menopause. In fact, estrogen treatment can offset this weight gain in many women." The medial amygd...

In a study conducted in rats, graduate student Rebecca Foright fed both male and female rats a high fat diet and then trained half of them to run on a treadmill. After a total of 10 weeks, there was a remarkable sex difference in response to the exercise training. Male rats who exercised ate less food and gained less weight than sedentary males. Exercising female rats did not reduce their food intake. At the end of the study they weighed the same as sedentary females. When this study was repeated in males fed a low fat diet, the research team found that the impact of exercise on body weight was evident even sooner than in the high fat diet fed male rats. These findings will be presented this week at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior. Other researchers have reported that a single bout of exercise leads to an increase in interleukin-6 (IL-6) in the hypothalamus of male rodents. The hypothalamus is a brain area playing a key role in monitoring sig...

"Imagine a drug regimen where an obese person would cycle between different drug therapies over the course of a month to achieve a greater degree of body weight loss compared to the effects achieved with either a single drug or the continuous combination of drugs," said senior author Dr. Matthew Hayes. His team studied the combination of two different drug classes that target different hormones: amylin and glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1). They found that combined treatments acted synergistically to suppress feeding and body weight. They also discovered that the weight loss effects of chronic amylin- and GLP-1-based combination  therapies could be enhanced when obese lab animals are cycled through their drug treatments. "The idea of drug-cycling is nothing new," says lead author Kieran Koch-Laskowski. "Millions of women on birth control pills, for example, already take daily pills that cycle between drug and placebo throughout the month," she goes on to ...

Medicines can have different effects on different people. The effects in children can vary due to changes that take place as they grow and develop. Historically, there has been very little focus on paediatric clinical pharmacology , and there are still a lot of unknowns with regard to optimally delivering medicines to children. In many paediatric populations worldwide the proportion of children who are overweight and obese is increasing, but there is wide geographical variation (from 16.9% in the USA to 0.5% in Denmark). The dosage of many children's drugs is based on total body weight (TBW) unfortunately obesity can cause problems establishing the best dose. Reservoirs After a drug is absorbed into the bloodstream , it rapidly circulates through the body. As the blood recirculates, the drug moves from the bloodstream into the body's tissues. Once absorbed, most drugs do not spread evenly throughout the body. Drugs that dissolve in water (water-soluble drugs) tend t...

Dietz notes that prevention efforts have focused primarily on children and adolescents, yet the prevalence of obesity roughly doubles between pre-adolescence (17 percent among 6 to 11-year old children) and young adulthood (34 percent among 20- to 39-year old adults). Because young adults are often parents or soon-to-be parents, prevention of obesity in this age group may also reduce the prevalence of obesity in their children. He also highlights data showing that excessive weight gain, defined as approximately 45 pounds or more, occurs most frequently during young adulthood. Furthermore, racial and ethnic disparities become more pronounced at this stage, yet very little is known about why the development of obesity and excessive weight gain occur. "Successful prevention will require more information on the timing, demographics, behaviors, and life-course transitions that could contribute to excessive weight gain in this group," he writes. No other age is associated wit...