14 DAY TRIAL // Besides what everybody knows that obesity is related to bad food habits and sedentary lifestyle, it appears that the common childhood obesity is linked to several genetic variations, a new research suggests.
Dr. Struan Grant from The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and his colleagues carried out a genetic analysis of a large group of children, descending from European American and African American populations, some suffering from common obesity and others with a normal, healthy body weight.
The goal was to find a type of genetic mutation called a copy number variation, or CNV, which is an absence or an excess of a certain gene.
Copy number variations have been associated with several inherited human diseases, extreme obesity being one of them, but the problem was that most previous studies have focused on adult subjects.
Co-author Dr. Hakon Hakonarson said that they “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.”
After analysis, the researchers found many deletion and duplication CNVs that can contribute to a genetic predisposition to common childhood obesity in European and African subjects.
Dr Grant said that this “study represents the first large-scale, unbiased genome wide scan of CNVs in common pediatric obesity and reveals genes impacted by CNVs that are exclusive to cases in two different ethnicities and have not previously been directly implicated in the context of obesity and await further characterization.
“Further functional studies will be needed to fully characterize the function of the genes at these loci in relation to childhood obesity.”
Obesity is a big society problem and these past years, obesity rates have increased in western societies, becoming an important risk factor for type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Furthermore, obese kids become obese adults and they risk an early death, as adolescent obesity has been linked to increased overall mortality in adults.
This research will open the way to future studies aimed at characterizing the affected genes and explaining the complex biology at the base of childhood obesity.
The study is published by Cell Press in the American Journal of Human Genetics.