Publisher Health

Progress made over decades to control overpopulation of dogs and cats through high-volume spay-neuter surgeries is at risk thanks to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, a team of UF researchers conclude in a new study.
The impact — felt both at community shelters and veterinary clinics — includes sharp declines in spay-neuter surgeries after the initial pandemic-triggered lockdowns, followed by staffing shortages in clinics and shelters, overcrowding and lagging pet adoption rates. All of these problems are compounded by a nationwide shortage of veterinarians, which has been felt even more acutely in shelters and spay-neuter clinics, the researchers say in a study that appears today (Sept. 13) in Frontiers of Veterinary Science.
Progress made over decades to control overpopulation of dogs and cats through high-volume spay-neuter surgeries is at risk thanks to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, a team of UF researchers conclude in a new study.
The study focused on the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the volume of surgical procedures performed by spay-neuter clinics, said Simone Guerios, D.V.M., Ph.D., a clinical assistant professor of shelter medicine at UF and the study’s lead author.
The team drew its research from 212 clinics nationally, all of which make use of the cloud-based clinic management software program Clinic HQ, which is specifically designed for facilities that focus on spay-neuter and preventive health care services.
“The high level of spay-neuter achieved over the past five decades is the single most important driver of reduced pet overpopulation and euthanasia in animal shelters,” Guerios said. “The rise in subsidized spay-neuter access helped drive the euthanasia of shelter pets in the United States from an estimated 13.5 million in 1973 to 1.5 million in 2019.”
Using 2019 as a baseline, the UF team aimed to determine the impact of the pandemic on the volume of spay-neuter procedures performed in 2020-2021 at the 212 clinics, which collectively performed more than 1 million surgeries per year and were on track to increase surgeries by 5% over the previous year.

Researchers have, for the first time, systematically estimated the impact of a range of different disease-associated genetic risk factors on the loss of healthy life years. Knowing the contribution of different genetic risk factors on disease burden can help prioritise and design interventions using genetic information.
How many years of healthy life does an individual with a specific genetic risk factor lose? New research from the University of Helsinki tries to provide an answer to this challenging question.
The scientists selected both common and rare disease-associated genetic variants and sorted them based on their impact on the average number of healthy life years lost, both from the perspective of an individual person and the population.
For this, they analysed genetic and health data from more than 735,000 individuals from two large biobank studies: the Finnish FinnGen study and UK Biobank.
The study, led by Andrea Ganna, a group leader at the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland FIMM, University of Helsinki, was published online September 12 in Nature Medicine.
The results show that, at the population level, common genetic variants that increase the risk of cardio-vascular diseases or Alzheimer’s disease have a substantial impact on the number of healthy life years lost.

A new study uses a data-intelligent model to highlight the need to boost vaccination campaign budgets for disadvantaged, vulnerable populations to reach the maximum health benefit for everyone.A new study uses a data-intelligent model to highlight the need to boost vaccination campaign budgets for disadvantaged, vulnerable populations to reach the maximum health benefit for everyone.
When vaccine access is prioritized for the most disadvantaged communities, it improves both social utility and equity — even when such populations have strong vaccine hesitancy. An international research team co-led by Prof. Pan HUI from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and HKUST(Guangzhou), Prof. James EVANS from the University of Chicago, and Prof. Yong LI from Tsinghua University, reveals the key to breaking the dilemma of multiple ethical values from a data-intelligent epidemic model which can predict COVID-19 curves in US metro areas accurately.
Classical epidemic models make strong assumptions about population mixing, i.e., people in an area mix homogeneously and thus have equal infection/fatality rates and equal chances to spread the virus. This is clearly not the case in the COVID-19 pandemic. The research team instead designed a model that explicitly incorporates mobility behavior and demographic differences to capture the diverse COVID-19 risks associated with different communities. The joint incorporation of human mobility data and demographic structures, both on a neighborhood level, allowed the team to depict more realistically how different subpopulations mix. For example, it’s crucial to notice that low-income families are worse off in this COVID scenario because they have to sustain their original level of mobility for the sake of livelihood, which exposes them to greater risk. Consequentially, they’re more likely to spread the virus, making them a key group to vaccinate (compared to many white-collar workers who can work from home).
The study produced two key findings. First, it underscores the importance of jointly considering mobility behavior and demographics when designing vaccine prioritization policies. Most existing vaccination schemes are designed based solely on age or a combination of age and occupation. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a social vulnerability index that they use in some regions to prioritize vaccines. Still, it fails to capture behavioral data and the differential likelihood of spreading and being exposed to COVID. By contrast, the proposed model dramatically improves the ability to target those disadvantaged persons that make the most out of limited vaccine resources to achieve the greatest benefit for everybody. The researchers also note that their smart model used coarse behavioral data — dispelling concerns about privacy leakage. In fact, many aggregate data sources can be used to fuel epidemic models without much worry about privacy or other issues.
The second major takeaway is that the authors argue for vastly boosting vaccination campaign budgets for disadvantaged, vulnerable populations. That includes both for outreach and for the risk that vaccinations could go to waste as the uptake may not be as swift among populations with greater vaccine-hesitancy, some with good historical reason. But more funding among these populations — who move about and mix with others in the community — goes a very long way to keep everyone safe. The advantage is persistent even if the vaccine hesitancy of the most disadvantaged populations is five times that of the better-off populations.
Prof. Hui, Chair Professor of Emerging Interdisciplinary Areas at HKUST and Chair Professor of Computational Media and Arts at HKUST(Guangzhou), said, “Epidemics not only threaten our society as a whole but also exacerbate inequalities that may tear society apart, as disadvantaged communities face more obstacles in reducing high-risk contacts and seeking healthcare. In situations of scarce medical resources, it is crucial to smartly distribute them so society can make the most out of them. To this end, our study presents a possible pathway to improve vaccine distribution decisions with data intelligence. Hopefully, data accumulated and lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic can help us better prepare for future challenges.”
This work was recently published in the scientific journal Nature Human Behaviour.
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Most parents have experienced frustration when their infants cry excessively and refuse to sleep. Scientists have found that the best strategy to calm them down is by holding and walking with them for five minutes. This evidence-based soothing strategy is presented in a paper published September 13 in the journal Current Biology.
“Many parents suffer from babies’ nighttime crying,” says corresponding author Kumi Kuroda of the RIKEN Center for Brain Science in Japan. “That’s such a big issue, especially for inexperienced parents, that can lead to parental stress and even to infant maltreatment in a small number of cases,” she says.
Kuroda and her colleagues have been studying the transport response, an innate reaction seen in many altricial mammals — those whose young are immature and unable to care for themselves — such as mice, dogs, monkeys, and humans. They observed that when these animals pick up their infants and start walking, the bodies of their young tend to become docile and their heart rates slow. Kuroda’s team wanted to compare the effects of the transport response, the relaxed reaction while being carried, with other conditions such as motionless maternal holding or rocking and also examine if the effects persist with longer carrying in human infants.
The researchers compared 21 infants’ responses while under four conditions: being held by their walking mothers, held by their sitting mothers, lying in a still crib, or lying in a rocking cot. The team found that when the mother walked while carrying the baby, the crying infants calmed down and their heart rates slowed within 30 seconds. A similar calming effect occurred when the infants were placed in a rocking cot, but not when the mother held the baby while sitting or placed the baby in a still crib.
This suggests that holding a baby alone might be insufficient in soothing crying infants, contradicting the traditional assumption that maternal holding reduces infant distress. At the same time, movement has calming effects, likely activating a baby’s transport response. The effect was more evident when the holding and walking motions continued for five minutes. All crying babies in the study stopped crying, and nearly half of them fell asleep.
But when the mothers tried to put their sleepy babies to bed, more than one-third of the participants became alert again within 20 seconds. The team found that all babies produced physiological responses, including changes in heart rate, that can wake them up the second their bodies detach from their mothers. However, if the infants were asleep for a longer period before being laid down, they were less likely to awaken during the process, the team found.
“Even as a mother of four, I was very surprised to see the result. I thought baby awoke during a laydown is related to how they’re put on the bed, such as their posture, or the gentleness of the movement,” Kuroda says. “But our experiment did not support these general assumptions.” While the experiment involved only mothers, Kuroda expects the effects are likely to be similar in any caregiver.
Based on their findings, the team proposes a method for soothing and promoting sleep in crying infants. They recommend that parents hold crying infants and walk with them for five minutes, followed by sitting and holding infants for another five to eight minutes before putting them to bed. The protocol, unlike other popular sleep training approaches such as letting infants cry until they fall asleep themselves, aims to provide an immediate solution for infant crying. Whether it can improve infant sleep in the long-term requires further research, Kuroda says.
“For many, we intuitively parent and listen to other people’s advice on parenting without testing the methods with rigorous science. But we need science to understand a baby’s behaviors, because they’re much more complex and diverse than we thought,” Kuroda says.
This research was supported by RIKEN Center for Brain Science and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
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Published1 day agoSharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, AFPThe UN has expressed concern about the first confirmed cholera outbreak in Syria in years, saying it poses a “serious threat” to the entire region.More than 900 suspected cases and eight deaths have been reported in the war-torn country in the past three weeks.The outbreak has been concentrated in Aleppo and Deir al-Zour provinces.It is believed to be linked to people drinking contaminated water from the River Euphrates, which flows through the provinces, and using it on crops.The outbreak is also seen as an indicator of the severe shortages of water throughout Syria caused by climate change and conflict.Rising temperatures, below-average rainfall and reduced flow from upstream neighbour Turkey have resulted in critically low levels in the Euphrates. That, combined with widespread damage to supply and sewerage infrastructure, has left many of the 5 million Syrians who depend on the river for drinking water and crop irrigation reliant on unsafe sources. It has also triggered an increase in dangerous water-borne diseases like cholera.The Syrian health ministry said on Monday that 20 cases of cholera, including two deaths, had been confirmed by laboratories in the northern province of Aleppo, the state-run Sana news agency reported. It added that another four cases had been confirmed in the coastal province of Latakia as well as two in the capital Damascus among patients from Aleppo.However, the UN warned that surveillance data showed a total of 936 severe acute diarrhoea cases, including at least eight related deaths, had been recorded across Syria since 25 August.More than 670 of those suspected cases and six of the deaths were in Aleppo, while 201 cases and two deaths were in the eastern province of Deir al-Zour. “The outbreak presents a serious threat to people in Syria and the region,” warned the UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Syria, Imran Riza. “Swift and urgent action is needed to prevent further illness and death,” he added, appealing to donor countries for urgent additional funding.The UN said rapid diagnostic tests, intravenous fluids and rehydration salts had been delivered to health facilities in affected communities and other high-risk areas, such as camps for displaced people. Clean water is also being delivered by lorries and chlorination is being scaled up.Cholera is an acute diarrhoeal infection caused by ingestion of food or water contaminated with the bacterium Vibrio cholera. In severe cases, the disease can kill within hours if left untreated.More on this storyWhy has the Syrian war lasted 11 years?15 MarchStopping deadly cholera with weather forecasts27 August 2018First global pledge to end cholera3 October 2017

Officials at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego had already begun work on a $1.2 billion transformation of its campus when the pandemic hit, forcing them to switch gears. As hospitals nationwide struggled to deal with surging cases, it became clear that the facility’s new design would need to evolve.“When the pandemic came along, it really changed the lens of how we do health care design,” said Dr. Nicholas Holmes, chief operating officer of Rady, the only children’s hospital in San Diego County and the largest in California. “And what we learned over the past few years, first and foremost, is to be as flexible in the design process as we can.”The early waves of the pandemic came crashing into hospitals, revealing intensive care units without enough beds, hallways and waiting rooms that forced the healthy and sick to commingle, and ventilation systems that became conduits for airborne pathogens. Given that hindsight, many hospitals are remodeling with a philosophy of flexible design, the idea that spaces should be adaptable for different purposes at different times. When the next pandemic comes, they’ll be able to better meet the moment.Traditional hospital design calls for sections that sequester the most vulnerable and contagious patients, with features not found in ordinary inpatient rooms. These include changeable airflow systems to keep microorganisms from traveling beyond the room’s walls; headwalls behind beds for electric, gas and equipment mounts; and, in general, a larger floor plan to accommodate specialized equipment like ventilators.In times of crisis, hospitals require more of these specialized spaces, with different protocols of isolation for different diseases.At Rady Children’s Hospital, where a new seven-story tower will house an intensive care unit as well as an emergency department, designers looked at the lessons learned from the pandemic and scrapped the tower’s original rectangular floor plan. In its place, they created one shaped like an X, with a 60-bed floor plan that can be converted into 20 fully isolated rooms for infectious-disease patients, should the need arise.The rooms at Doylestown are clustered in pods of eight.Hannah Yoon for The New York TimesThe I.C.U. will be the second wing with flexible design.Hannah Yoon for The New York Times“Rather than looking at it on a single-room basis, when you think about maximum flexibility, you think about banks of rooms,” Dr. Holmes said. “Seeing it through that lens allows you to not have to transfer patients who are moderately sick into critically intensive care units.”Much of the shift in hospital design revolves around surge capacity, which is how health care workers adapt inside their buildings when the number of sick patients jumps substantially. In March and April 2020, the sudden rise in contagious patients meant some hospitals were scrambling to find beds, setting up overflow tents in parking lots and rationing equipment.“During the pandemic, they were doing hopscotch or leapfrog; they had to adapt on the fly,” said Douglas King, vice president of health care at Project Management Advisors, a real estate consulting firm. “Now hospitals are identifying wards, usually of 24 to 32 beds, and they can stack some of those wards together to become pandemic wards.”Read More on the Coronavirus PandemicEducational Declines: Test results show the pandemic’s effect on U.S. students: The math and reading scores of 9-year-olds dropped steeply, erasing two decades of progress.Heavy Toll: The average life expectancy of Americans fell precipitously in 2020 and 2021. The decline, largely driven by the pandemic, was particularly pronounced among Indigenous communities.Boosters: An influential panel of expert advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended updated coronavirus booster shots to the vast majority of Americans, clearing the way for health workers to begin giving people the redesigned shots within days.Paxlovid Study: The Covid-19 medication Paxlovid reduced hospitalizations and deaths in older patients, but made no difference for patients under 65, new research from Israel found.To prepare for that shift, designers are thinking about how traditional rooms can quickly morph into isolation wards by upgrading or overhauling their heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems. Fabrics and finishes, too, are being reconsidered, with an eye toward durable materials that can withstand industrial-level scrubbing.Finally, the pathways that lead to these wards need to be rethought, Mr. King said, “so the transportation for patients and staff allows these spaces to be isolated and operated independently from the rest of the hospital.”A new I.C.U. at Doylestown Hospital in Doylestown, Pa., which opened in 2021, has private rooms meant to flex between intensive care and step-down care. The rooms are clustered in pods of eight to reduce traffic in corridors.It will be the second new wing with flexible design at Doylestown. After realizing that a new wing for heart and vascular care that opened in January 2020 could be used for critically ill Covid-19 patients during the pandemic, hospital administrators leaned into flexible design.“The pandemic proved the need to have flexible space,” said Jim Brexler, chief executive of Doylestown Health. “The impact of having adequate critical care space was essential, and you don’t want to build all that out and not be able to use it for other purposes.“This is the future of hospitals,” he added.CannonDesign, an architecture firm in New York, was involved in two hospital expansion projects.At Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, workers broke ground on a 16-story inpatient tower in 2021, including acute-care rooms that can morph into I.C.U. rooms. To achieve that flexibility, designers included additional outlets for medical gas and electricity, and larger clearances around beds to accommodate extra equipment. The upper half of doors will be made of glass to allow practitioners to observe highly contagious patients without entering the room.A whiteboard in an I.C.U. room at Doylestown.Hannah Yoon for The New York TimesA private bathroom inside an I.C.U. room in the hospital.Hannah Yoon for The New York TimesAnd at WellSpan Health in York, Pa., an eight-story surgical and critical care tower being built as part of a $398 million hospital expansion will have oversize patient rooms that can function as spaces for critical care.“The general sense that I get is that this is not a one-time situation that we just went through with Covid,” said Jocelyn Stroupe, co-director of health interiors for CannonDesign. “It’s just one of many infectious disease conditions that we’re going to be experiencing in the coming decades.”Preparations for those disease conditions can be seen on other construction sites across the nation.Ballantyne Medical Center, a 168,000-square-foot hospital in Charlotte, N.C., scheduled to open next year, will feature dual headwalls for more capacity in patient rooms and ventilation systems that allow rooms to be converted to negative pressure ones that prevent harmful airborne particles from flowing into other spaces. An outpatient center being built as part of a $151 million renovation at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta will have flexible rooms with mobile equipment that can quickly be transferred from space to space.And in Los Angeles, CHA Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center plans to open a new patient tower in 2023 with larger waiting rooms that allow for distancing, more rooms with negative pressure ventilation and a tripled capacity for blood-oxygen monitoring systems. Thirty-three private rooms are being added as well, all of which can be reconfigured for surge capacity.The focus on flexible design is not unique to hospitals, said John Swift, who leads the health care sector at the engineering and design consulting firm Buro Happold. Three years into the pandemic, it has become an almost universal concern.“We’re seeing these trends not just in health care but in all the facilities we do work in, from laboratory buildings to institutional buildings on college campuses,” he said.The shift to flexible design will mean that, in the short term at least, some hospitals are better equipped than others to handle the next pandemic. And it will also exacerbate the gap between the haves and have-nots in health care, said Armstead Jones, a strategic real estate adviser for Real Estate Bees.“You have hospitals that are barely holding on in rural areas, and they can’t afford flexibility in architecture. So what does it look like to them?” he said.But in the long term, designers expect the lessons from the coronavirus to resonate. Pandemic modifications, they say, are likely to eventually be written into law, much like access for those in wheelchairs and structural requirements for earthquakes.“This is no different from the code updates we go through every time there is an earthquake in California,” said Carlos L. Amato, a health care architect with Cannon Design. “The lessons learned postpandemic will eventually make it into building codes.”Much of the shift in hospital design revolves around surge capacity, but other businesses and institutions are beginning to think more about how to make their spaces more flexible, too.Hannah Yoon for The New York Times

Older adults who consistently get up early and remain active throughout the day are happier and perform better on cognitive tests than those with irregular activity patterns, according to a new study led by University of Pittsburgh researchers.
The findings, published online in JAMA Psychiatry, suggest that patterns of activity — not just activity intensity — are important for healthy aging and mental health.
“There’s something about getting going early, staying active all day and following the same routine each day that seems to be protecting older adults,” said lead author Stephen Smagula, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychiatry and epidemiology at Pitt. “What’s exciting about these findings is that activity patterns are under voluntary control, which means that making intentional changes to one’s daily routine could improve health and wellness.”
To learn more about daily activity patterns in U.S.-based older adults and identify links with mental health and cognition, Smagula and his team recruited 1,800 senior citizens aged over 65. Participants wore accelerometers — movement-detecting devices often found in smartphones and exercise trackers — on their wrist for seven days to measure activity, and they completed questionnaires to assess depression symptoms and cognitive function.
The analysis showed that 37.6% of participants rose early in the morning, stayed active throughout the day and had consistent daily routines.
“Many older adults had robust patterns: They get up before 7 a.m. on average, and they keep going; they stay active for 15 hours or so each day. They also tend to follow the same pattern day in, day out,” said Smagula. “Lo and behold, those same adults were happier, less depressed and had better cognitive function than other participants.”
Another group comprising 32.6% of participants similarly had consistent daily patterns but were active for an average of just 13.4 hours each day because they rose later in the morning or settled down earlier in the evening. This group had more depression symptoms and poorer cognition than the early risers.

Zika virus has a trick up its sleeve. Once inside the body, the virus likes to make a bee line for dendritic cells, the cells we rely on to launch an effective immune response.
“Dendritic cells are major cells of the innate immune system,” says LJI Professor Sujan Shresta, Ph.D., a member of the LJI Center for Infectious Disease and Vaccine Research. “How is this virus so clever that it’s able to establish infection in cells that would normally fight infections?”
Now Shresta and colleagues at LJI and the University of California, San Diego, have found that Zika virus actually forces dendritic cells to stop acting as immune cells. Using a new model of Zika virus infection, the LJI team showed that Zika virus instead makes dendritic cells churn out lipid molecules, which the virus uses to build copies of itself.
“Here are dendritic cells doing everything to help a virus,” says Shresta.
The Nature Communications study is a major step forward in the Shresta Lab’s work to guide the design of new antiviral therapies against many members of the Flavivirus family, including Zika, dengue, and Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV).
“Understanding how viruses interact with human cells is critical for understanding how to treat or prevent infection in the future,” says UC San Diego Professor Aaron Carlin, M.D., Ph.D., a former trainee in the Shresta Lab and co-leader of the new study.

Beating the blues with food? A new study adds evidence that meal timing may affect mental health, including levels of depression- and anxiety-related mood. Investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, designed a study that simulated night work and then tested the effects of daytime and nighttime eating versus daytime eating only. The team found that, among participants in the daytime and nighttime eating group, depression-like mood levels increased by 26 percent and anxiety-like mood levels by 16 percent. Participants in the daytime-only eating group did not experience this increase, suggesting that meal timing may influence mood vulnerability. Results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Our findings provide evidence for the timing of food intake as a novel strategy to potentially minimize mood vulnerability in individuals experiencing circadian misalignment, such as people engaged in shift work, experiencing jet lag, or suffering from circadian rhythm disorders,” said co-corresponding author Frank A. J. L. Scheer, PhD, Director of the Medical Chronobiology Program in the Brigham’s Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders. “Future studies in shift workers and clinical populations are required to firmly establish if changes in meal timing can prevent their increased mood vulnerability. Until then, our study brings a new ‘player’ to the table: the timing of food intake matters for our mood.”
Shift workers account for up to 20 percent of the workforce in industrial societies and are directly responsible for many hospital services, factory work, and other essential services. Shift workers often experience a misalignment between their central circadian clock in the brain and daily behaviors, such as sleep/wake and fasting/eating cycles. Importantly, they also have a 25 to 40 percent higher risk of depression and anxiety.
“Shift workers — as well as individuals experiencing circadian disruption, including jet lag — may benefit from our meal timing intervention,” said co-corresponding author Sarah L. Chellappa, MD, PhD, who completed work on this project while at the Brigham. Chellappa is now in the Department of Nuclear Medicine, University of Cologne, Germany. “Our findings open the door for a novel sleep/circadian behavioral strategy that might also benefit individuals experiencing mental health disorders. Our study adds to a growing body of evidence finding that strategies that optimize sleep and circadian rhythms may help promote mental health.”
To conduct the study, Scheer, Chellappa, and colleagues enrolled 19 participants (12 men and 7 women) for a randomized controlled study. Participants underwent a Forced Desynchrony protocol in dim light for four 28-hour “days,” such that by the fourth “day” their behavioral cycles were inverted by 12 hours, simulating night work and causing circadian misalignment. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two meal timing groups: the Daytime and Nighttime Meal Control Group, which had meals according to a 28-hour cycle (resulting in eating both during the night and day, which is typical among night workers), and the Daytime-Only Meal Intervention Group, which had meals on a 24-hour cycle (resulting in eating only during the day). The team assessed depression- and anxiety-like mood levels every hour.
The team found that meal timing significantly affected the participants’ mood levels. During the simulated night shift (day 4), those in the Daytime and Nighttime Meal Control Group had increased depression-like mood levels and anxiety-like mood levels, compared to baseline (day 1). In contrast, there were no changes in mood in the Daytime Meal Intervention Group during the simulated night shift. Participants with a greater degree of circadian misalignment experienced more depression- and anxiety-like mood.
“Meal timing is emerging as an important aspect of nutrition that may influence physical health,” said Chellappa. “But the causal role of the timing of food intake on mental health remains to be tested. Future studies are required to establish if changes in meal timing can help individuals experiencing depressive and anxiety/anxiety-related disorders.”
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A team led by Van Andel Institute scientists has identified two distinct types of obesity with physiological and molecular differences that may have lifelong consequences for health, disease and response to medication.
The findings, published today in the journal Nature Metabolism, offer a more nuanced understanding of obesity than current definitions and may one day inform more precise ways to diagnose and treat obesity and associated metabolic disorders.
The study also reveals new details about the role of epigenetics and chance in health and provides insights into the link between insulin and obesity.
“Nearly two billion people worldwide are considered overweight and there are more than 600 million people with obesity, yet we have no framework for stratifying individuals according to their more precise disease etiologies,” said J. Andrew Pospisilik, Ph.D., chair of Van Andel Institute’s Department of Epigenetics and corresponding author of the study. “Using a purely data-driven approach, we see for the first time that there are at least two different metabolic subtypes of obesity, each with their own physiological and molecular features that influence health. Translating these findings into a clinically usable test could help doctors provide more precise care for patients.”
Currently, obesity is diagnosed using body mass index (BMI), an index correlated to body fat that is generated by comparing weight in relation to height. It is an imperfect measure, Pospisilik says, because it doesn’t account for underlying biological differences and can misrepresent an individual’s health status.
Using a combination of laboratory studies in mouse models and deep analysis of data from TwinsUK, a pioneering research resource and study cohort developed in the United Kingdom, Pospisilik and his collaborators discovered four metabolic subtypes that influence individual body types: two prone to leanness and two prone to obesity.