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Strategies for decreasing a child’s risk for obesity often focus on improving eating habits and maintaining a high level of physical activity. While this is one way…

Men who are overweight or obese when diagnosed with prostate cancer are at greater risk of death after treatment, according to a new study in the December 15,…

There is no “one size fits all” when it comes to weight loss through exercise, says Queensland University of Technology behavioural scientist Neil King.

Dr Neil King, from QUT’s Institute…

Scientists can now measure how full or hungry a mouse feels, thanks to a new technique which uses imaging to reveal how neurons behave in the part of…

Dr Neil King, from QUT’s Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation, is the lead author of a study conducted in collaboration with the University of Leeds in the UK, which…

The association between weight and causes of death can vary considerably, with obesity associated with a significantly increased mortality from cardiovascular disease (CVD), underweight associated with increased…

The older obese population in the U.S. appear to be experiencing more impairments in functional abilities related to movement, although there have been improvements in the cardiovascular health of…

A team of researchers from the St Vincent’s Campus in Sydney have developed a novel way to control the extreme weight loss, common in late stage cancer, which often speeds…

U.S. scientists have found a cell receptor that might become a target in programs designed to control obesity and prevent such ills as obesity and diabetes.

University of Cincinnati researchers said…

Keeping slim is one of the best ways of preventing cancer, as is avoiding excessive amounts of red meat and wine, a landmark study has revealed.

The World Cancer…

Thresholds limiting bariatric surgeries to high-volume centers disproportionately restrict access for poor and underinsured patients, populations which are among the most in need of them,…

Transgenic techniques involve introduction of genes (or regulatory sequences) into the germline of mice so that target gene expression may be either introduced de novo …

In writing this chapter, we set out to illustrate some of the problems that have beset the study of obesity genetics, to evaluate some of the techniques currently available…

In contrast to linkage studies,  association studies aim to detect co-segregation of a marker with a specific obesity phenotype in closely matched samples of affected and non-affected individuals who…

QTL are loci which individually have a small but measurable influence on a continuous phenotype such as body weight rather than giving rise to discrete disease present…

Linkage is said to occur if two different alleles are passed to a subsequent generation in a proportion different to that expected by chance alone and is therefore a…

Having chosen an appropriate phenotype upon which to build a specific hypothesis, it is then necessary to consider the potential for a range of temporal and other para-genetic factors…

Following the identification of the leptin gene mutation in ob/ob mice,  three highly obese children from two consanguineous but unrelated families who carried non-functioning mutations of the leptin…

Given that the explosion in obesity prevalence over the past 20 years is likely to have taken place against a background of relatively constant population genetic structure,  the question of to…

Defining the phenotype
One of the first problems faced in attempting to define a genetic basis for obesity is deciding what kind of effect (phenotype) we…

Positional genetic techniques require no special previous knowledge of the function of an individual genomic region but implicate it in the causation of obesity purely on the grounds that…

The ultimate goal of obesity genetics is to identify a gene defect found exclusively in obese patients producing a functional variant (for example with altered or absent protein function,  the so-called ‘smoking…

Several large population studies using segregation techniques predicted the existence of one or more ‘major’ recessive gene effects independent of the discovery of any specific obesity gene (Rice et al., …