Sunday, June 1, 2025
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
No Result
View All Result
Health News, Pharma, Doctor, Nutrition, Fitness, Wellness, Healthcare Industry, Business, Health Magazine
  • Home
  • Being a Doctor
    Uptick in Respiratory and Cardiac Problems due to Poor Air Quality grips Delhi

    Uptick in Respiratory and Cardiac Problems due to Poor Air Quality grips Delhi

    Climate Change: The Hidden Catalyst of Viral Outbreaks

    Climate Change: The Hidden Catalyst of Viral Outbreaks

    Robotic kidney surgery successfully performed on a 21-day old infant

    Robotic kidney surgery successfully performed on a 21-day old infant

  • Top Stories
    Free medical camp held in Rohtak to honour legacy of Dr. S.N. Chugh

    Free medical camp held in Rohtak to honour legacy of Dr. S.N. Chugh

    Health Minister chairs a review meeting with key experts and officials on new XE-variant

    Health Min Bans 14 Fixed-Dose Combination Drugs in India

    BestDoc expands its operations to Dubai

    BestDoc expands its operations to Dubai

  • Industry Spotlight
    Mumbai Oncocare Centre raises $ 10 million in Series A funding

    2070 Health raises $30M in seed funding

    Freudenberg Medical’s Bold Leap: Embracing India’s Dynamic Healthcare Landscape

    Freudenberg Medical’s Bold Leap: Embracing India’s Dynamic Healthcare Landscape

    Metropolis Healthcare launches test for HSCT & solid organ transplantation

    Metropolis Healthcare launches test for HSCT & solid organ transplantation

  • Specialities
    • All
    • Cardiology
    • Dentistry
    • Dermatology
    • Diabetology
    • Gastroenterology
    • Gynaecology
    • Neurology
    • Oncology
    • Ophthalmology
    • Oral Care
    • Orthopaedics
    • Paediatrics
    • Psychiatry
    • Radiology
    Breast Cancer: Better safe than sorry

    Breast Cancer: Better safe than sorry

    Premature baby girl gets a new lease of life

    Premature baby girl gets a new lease of life

    Understanding why deadly brain cancer comes back

    Understanding why deadly brain cancer comes back

  • Wellness Matters
    • All
    • Being a Mom
    • Fitness & More
    • Healthy Lifestyle
    • Nutritious Diet
    Beware gym goers: weight lifting might make your veins stick out

    Beware gym goers: weight lifting might make your veins stick out

    Top Diet Tips for students to beat stress this exam season

    Top Diet Tips for students to beat stress this exam season

    How better planning, behaviour regulation may lead to eating less fat

    How better planning, behaviour regulation may lead to eating less fat

  • Pharma Focus
    How India is making its presence felt in the world pharmaceutical market

    How India is making its presence felt in the world pharmaceutical market

    Top Health News of the Day: July 22, 2021

    8,001 Janaushadhi Kendras opened so far covering all the districts of the country

    India to have more than sufficient stock of Liposomal Amphotericin B drug: Mansukh Mandaviya

    India to have more than sufficient stock of Liposomal Amphotericin B drug: Mansukh Mandaviya

Health News, Pharma, Doctor, Nutrition, Fitness, Wellness, Healthcare Industry, Business, Health Magazine
  • Home
  • Being a Doctor
    Uptick in Respiratory and Cardiac Problems due to Poor Air Quality grips Delhi

    Uptick in Respiratory and Cardiac Problems due to Poor Air Quality grips Delhi

    Climate Change: The Hidden Catalyst of Viral Outbreaks

    Climate Change: The Hidden Catalyst of Viral Outbreaks

    Robotic kidney surgery successfully performed on a 21-day old infant

    Robotic kidney surgery successfully performed on a 21-day old infant

  • Top Stories
    Free medical camp held in Rohtak to honour legacy of Dr. S.N. Chugh

    Free medical camp held in Rohtak to honour legacy of Dr. S.N. Chugh

    Health Minister chairs a review meeting with key experts and officials on new XE-variant

    Health Min Bans 14 Fixed-Dose Combination Drugs in India

    BestDoc expands its operations to Dubai

    BestDoc expands its operations to Dubai

  • Industry Spotlight
    Mumbai Oncocare Centre raises $ 10 million in Series A funding

    2070 Health raises $30M in seed funding

    Freudenberg Medical’s Bold Leap: Embracing India’s Dynamic Healthcare Landscape

    Freudenberg Medical’s Bold Leap: Embracing India’s Dynamic Healthcare Landscape

    Metropolis Healthcare launches test for HSCT & solid organ transplantation

    Metropolis Healthcare launches test for HSCT & solid organ transplantation

  • Specialities
    • All
    • Cardiology
    • Dentistry
    • Dermatology
    • Diabetology
    • Gastroenterology
    • Gynaecology
    • Neurology
    • Oncology
    • Ophthalmology
    • Oral Care
    • Orthopaedics
    • Paediatrics
    • Psychiatry
    • Radiology
    Breast Cancer: Better safe than sorry

    Breast Cancer: Better safe than sorry

    Premature baby girl gets a new lease of life

    Premature baby girl gets a new lease of life

    Understanding why deadly brain cancer comes back

    Understanding why deadly brain cancer comes back

  • Wellness Matters
    • All
    • Being a Mom
    • Fitness & More
    • Healthy Lifestyle
    • Nutritious Diet
    Beware gym goers: weight lifting might make your veins stick out

    Beware gym goers: weight lifting might make your veins stick out

    Top Diet Tips for students to beat stress this exam season

    Top Diet Tips for students to beat stress this exam season

    How better planning, behaviour regulation may lead to eating less fat

    How better planning, behaviour regulation may lead to eating less fat

  • Pharma Focus
    How India is making its presence felt in the world pharmaceutical market

    How India is making its presence felt in the world pharmaceutical market

    Top Health News of the Day: July 22, 2021

    8,001 Janaushadhi Kendras opened so far covering all the districts of the country

    India to have more than sufficient stock of Liposomal Amphotericin B drug: Mansukh Mandaviya

    India to have more than sufficient stock of Liposomal Amphotericin B drug: Mansukh Mandaviya

No Result
View All Result
Health News, Pharma, Doctor, Nutrition, Fitness, Wellness, Healthcare Industry, Business, Health Magazine
No Result
View All Result
Home Industry Spotlight

Scientists discover 14 genes that cause obesity

The discovery of genes that directly cause obesity could pave the way for treatments for a condition that affects millions across the world

October 18, 2021
Scientists discover 14 genes that cause obesity

The obesity discovery from UVA's Eyleen O'Rourke, PhD, and her collaborators opens the door to new treatments for the condition.

By Health In Five Writer

Promising news in the effort to develop drugs to treat obesity: University of Virginia scientists have identified 14 genes that can cause and three that can prevent weight gain. The findings pave the way for treatments to combat a health problem that affects more than 40% of American adults and people across the world.

“We know of hundreds of gene variants that are more likely to show up in individuals suffering obesity and other diseases. But ‘more likely to show up’ does not mean causing the disease. This uncertainty is a major barrier to exploit the power of population genomics to identify targets to treat or cure obesity. To overcome this barrier, we developed an automated pipeline to simultaneously test hundreds of genes for a causal role in obesity. Our first round of experiments uncovered more than a dozen genes that cause and three genes that prevent obesity,” said Eyleen O’Rourke of UVA’s College of Arts & Sciences, the School of Medicine’s Department of Cell Biology and the Robert M. Berne Cardiovascular Research Center. “We anticipate that our approach and the new genes we uncovered will accelerate the development of treatments to reduce the burden of obesity.”

The obesity discovery from UVA’s Eyleen O’Rourke, PhD, and her collaborators opens the door to new treatments for the condition.

OBESITY AND OUR GENES

O’Rourke’s new research helps shed light on the complex intersections of obesity, diet and our DNA. Obesity has become an epidemic, driven in large part by high-calorie diets laden with sugar and high-fructose corn syrup. Increasingly sedentary lifestyles play a big part as well. But our genes play an important role too, regulating fat storage and affecting how well our bodies burn food as fuel. So if we can identify the genes that convert excessive food into fat, we could seek to inactivate them with drugs and uncouple excessive eating from obesity.

Genomicists have identified hundreds of genes associated with obesity — meaning the genes are more or less prevalent in people who are obese than in people with healthy weight. The challenge is determining which genes play causal roles by directly promoting or helping prevent weight gain. To sort wheat from chaff, O’Rourke and her team turned to humble worms known as C. elegans. These tiny worms like to live in rotting vegetation and enjoy feasting on microbes. However, they share more than 70% of our genes, and, like people, they become obese if they are fed excessive amounts of sugar.

The worms have produced great benefits for science. They’ve been used to decipher how common drugs, including the antidepressant Prozac and the glucose-stabilizing metformin, work. Even more impressively, in the last 20 years three Nobel prizes were awarded for the discovery of cellular processes first observed in worms but then found to be critical to diseases such as cancer and neurodegeneration. They’ve also been fundamental to the development of therapeutics based on RNA technology.

In new work just published in the scientific journal PLOS Genetics, O’Rourke and her collaborators used the worms to screen 293 genes associated with obesity in people, with the goal of defining which of the genes were actually causing or preventing obesity. They did this by developing a worm model of obesity, feeding some a regular diet and some a high-fructose diet.

This obesity model, coupled to automation and supervised machine learning-assisted testing, allowed them to identify 14 genes that cause obesity and three that help prevent it. Enticingly, they found that blocking the action of the three genes that prevented the worms from becoming obese also led to them living longer and having better neuro-locomotory function. Those are exactly the type of benefits drug developers would hope to obtain from anti-obesity medicines.

More work needs to be done, of course. But the researchers say the indicators are encouraging. For example, blocking the effect of one of the genes in lab mice prevented weight gain, improved insulin sensitivity and lowered blood sugar levels. These results (plus the fact that the genes under study were chosen because they were associated with obesity in humans) bode well that the results will hold true in people as well, the researchers say.

“Anti-obesity therapies are urgently needed to reduce the burden of obesity in patients and the healthcare system,” O’Rourke said. “Our combination of human genomics with causality tests in model animals promises yielding anti-obesity targets more likely to succeed in clinical trials because of their anticipated increased efficacy and reduced side effects.”

Follow Health In Five on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter & Instagram

Subscribe on WhatsApp & Telegram to receive real time updates

Tags: #brain#diseases#HealthIndia#HealthInformation#HealthNews#illness#medical#pharma#surgerycoronavirusCOVIDCOVID-19DoctorsFitnessHealthHealthcarehealthinfiveMedicineWellness
Previous Post

Top 10 Health News of the Day: October 13, 2021

Next Post

Top 10 Health News of the Day: October 20, 2021

Health in Five

Health in Five

Related Posts

Mumbai Oncocare Centre raises $ 10 million in Series A funding
Industry Spotlight

2070 Health raises $30M in seed funding

June 7, 2023
Freudenberg Medical’s Bold Leap: Embracing India’s Dynamic Healthcare Landscape
Industry Spotlight

Freudenberg Medical’s Bold Leap: Embracing India’s Dynamic Healthcare Landscape

May 10, 2023
Metropolis Healthcare launches test for HSCT & solid organ transplantation
Industry Spotlight

Metropolis Healthcare launches test for HSCT & solid organ transplantation

April 14, 2023
How the cloud utilisation can transform the pharmaceutical industry
First Opinion

How the cloud utilisation can transform the pharmaceutical industry

February 27, 2023
21-yr old Yemeni woman with TB in eyes successfully treated
Industry Spotlight

21-yr old Yemeni woman with TB in eyes successfully treated

February 20, 2023
Know about the connection between diabetes and fungal infections
First Opinion

Know about the connection between diabetes and fungal infections

February 18, 2023
Next Post
Top 10 Health News of the Day: October 20, 2021

Top 10 Health News of the Day: October 20, 2021

Top 10 Health News of the Day: October 21, 2021

Top 10 Health News of the Day: October 21, 2021

  • Trending
  • Comments
  • Latest
New study reveals where memories of familiar places are stored in the brain

New study reveals where memories of familiar places are stored in the brain

May 17, 2021
47yr old man with a rare complication of deep vein thrombosis successfully treated

47yr old man with a rare complication of deep vein thrombosis successfully treated

February 5, 2021
Brain aneurysm successfully treated using a contour device

Brain aneurysm successfully treated using a contour device

January 25, 2021

Health Talk by Dr. Nutan Ray

September 23, 2020
Free medical camp held in Rohtak to honour legacy of Dr. S.N. Chugh

Free medical camp held in Rohtak to honour legacy of Dr. S.N. Chugh

Cytology Aiding in Early Breast Cancer Detection

Cytology Aiding in Early Breast Cancer Detection

Top Tips to Avail Home Healthcare Services

Top Tips to Avail Home Healthcare Services

Easy Home Exercises when locked up during Coronavirus Pandemic

Easy Home Exercises when locked up during Coronavirus Pandemic

Free medical camp held in Rohtak to honour legacy of Dr. S.N. Chugh

Free medical camp held in Rohtak to honour legacy of Dr. S.N. Chugh

November 4, 2024
Uptick in Respiratory and Cardiac Problems due to Poor Air Quality grips Delhi

Uptick in Respiratory and Cardiac Problems due to Poor Air Quality grips Delhi

February 22, 2024
ECHO India and PGICH Noida assess progress of National Program on Thalassemia Control

ECHO India and PGICH Noida assess progress of National Program on Thalassemia Control

February 20, 2024
Climate Change: The Hidden Catalyst of Viral Outbreaks

Climate Change: The Hidden Catalyst of Viral Outbreaks

September 25, 2023
More Media More Media

About Us

“The extension to all peoples of the benefits of medical, psychological and related knowledge is essential to the fullest attainment of health.” “Health is a state of complete mental, social and physical well-being, not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”

Read More

Categories

  • Ayush
  • Being a Doctor
  • Being a Mom
  • Cardiology
  • Covid Corner
  • Dentistry
  • Dermatology
  • Devices & Equipments
  • Diabetology
  • Digital Health
  • Featured Videos
  • First Opinion
  • Fitness & More
  • Gastroenterology
  • Gynaecology
  • HealthInFive Pulse
  • Healthy Lifestyle
  • Industry Spotlight
  • Labs@Work
  • Neurology
  • News of The Day
  • Nutritious Diet
  • Oncology
  • Ophthalmology
  • Oral Care
  • Orthopaedics
  • Paediatrics
  • Pharma Focus
  • Podcasts
  • Psychiatry
  • Radiology
  • Specialities
  • Top Stories
  • Wellness Matters

Quick Links

  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms and Conditions

Find us on Social Media

copyright@2022 DD100 Health

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Being a Doctor
  • Top Stories
  • Industry Spotlight
  • Specialities
  • Wellness Matters
  • Pharma Focus

copyright@2022 DD100 Health