|
(Date Posted:07/25/2007 1:30 PM)
Is Obesity Contagious?Some medical researchers believe that human adenoviruses may be the cause of the current obesity epidemic, and according to them, the best way to avoid gaining weight is: "Eat right, exercise and wash your hands." Their study into the possibility of viruses triggering obesity has just been published in theAmerican Journal of Physiology-Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology. The study was led by Leah D. Whigham, who said that there was growing evidence that certain viruses may cause obesity, making it contagious.The researchers found that the human adenovirus Ad-37 causes obesity in chickens. This finding builds on earlier studies that two related viruses - Ad-36 and Ad-5 - also cause obesity in animals. Additionally, Ad-36 has been associated with human obesity, leading researchers to suspect that Ad-37 may also be implicated in human obesity. Whigham said more research was needed to find out if Ad-37 causes obesity in humans as previous studies were inconclusive.The idea that viruses can cause obesity has been a controversial one among scientists. But there is evidence that factors other than poor diet or lack of exercise may be at work in the obesity epidemic. "The prevalence of obesity has doubled in adults in the United States in the last 30 years and has tripled in children," the researchers noted. "With the exception of infectious diseases, no other chronic disease in history has spread so rapidly, and the etiological factors producing this epidemic have not been clearly identified.""It's a big mental leap to think you can catch obesity," admitted Whigham. But she noted that other diseases, once thought to be the product of environmental factors, are now known to stem from infectious agents. Stomach ulcers, for example, were once thought to be the result of stress, but researchers eventually implicated the bacterium,H. pylori, as the cause.Commenting on the new study, Frank Greenway, of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, said: "If Ad-36 is responsible for a significant portion of human obesity, the logical therapeutic intervention would be to develop a vaccine to prevent future infections. If a vaccine were to be developed, one would want to ensure that all the serotypes of human adenoviruses responsible for human obesity were covered in the vaccine."But there is still much to learn about how these viruses work. "There are people and animals that get infected and don't get fat. We don't know why," Whigham said. She speculates that perhaps the virus hasn't been in the body long enough to produce the additional fat; or the virus creates a tendency to obesity that must be triggered by overeating.
--------------------------------------------------------------
 "Time spent with your dog is never wasted."
|
