The Genetics of Relatively Healthy Obesity
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AzumaHazuki:
The genetics of relatively healthy obesity:
In general, obesity is linked with a large range of health problems-for most people, at least. But for a substantial minority of those who are overweight, obesity is accompanied by indications of decent health, with no signs of impending diabetes or cardiovascular disease. These cases have probably received unwarranted attention[1]; who doesn't want to convince themselves that they're an exception to an unfortunate rule, after all?
[...] a large international team of researchers has looked into whether some of these cases might be the product of genetic influences[2]. And simply by using existing data, the team found 61 instances where a location in our genomes is associated with both elevated obesity and signs of good health, cardiovascular or otherwise.
[...] Combining all the past studies in these areas, the researchers were able to leverage a sample of hundreds of thousands of individuals.
To find the sorts of genes the team was interested in, the researchers had a simple criterion: the same area of the genome has to be associated with both one of the measures of obesity and one of the measures of metabolic or cardiovascular health. After doing the pairwise comparisons, the researchers checked whether any of the areas that came out of the analysis was associated with more than one measure (so, for example, health levels of both cholesterol and glucose).
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