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The study focused on a region of the brain that regulates food intake, physical activity and metabolism
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October 4, 2022 • 19 minutes ago • Read 2 minutes • Join the conversation A new study in mice found that if any of the changes go wrong in a specific part of the brain early on, it could lead to weight gain significant later in life. . Photo by Getty
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Obesity may be preventable with dietary supplements before pregnancy and should be treated as a neurodevelopmental disorder, researchers say, according to a new study.
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There are two billion people worldwide who are overweight, and 650 million of these people are affected by obesity, the World Health Organization reported in 2016. With this study, researchers hoped to find ways to ‘to stop what they called a worldwide epidemic. . The study, published in the journal Scientific Advances, was conducted by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas along with other institutions.
“The undeniable observation of the past few decades is that obesity treatment doesn’t work very well,” lead author Dr. Robert Waterland told the National Post. He is a professor of pediatrics-nutrition and a member of the USDA Child Nutrition Research Center at Baylor.
“Clearly we need a different approach,” he said.
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The new approach, in light of the study, is to treat obesity as a neurodevelopmental disorder, some of which have been successfully prevented with dietary supplements. For example, neural tube defects that occur in human fetuses have been prevented by increasing folic acid in the diet.
“The data show very clearly that folic acid fortification of the food supply has been very effective in preventing this devastating developmental outcome of neural tube defects, which includes things like spina bifida,” Waterland said.
“We need to take a similar approach with obesity because each individual’s body weight regulation mechanism relies heavily on the brain.”
The study, done in mice, focused on a region of the brain that regulates food intake, physical activity and metabolism called the arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus, explained the study’s first author, the Dr. Harry MacKay. The researchers studied epigenetics: “a system of molecular markers that determine which genes will be used or not used in different types of cells.”
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The arcuate nucleus undergoes epigenetic changes, in a fetus and in early childhood, which may subsequently affect the programming of body weight regulation. Changes in this part of the brain could lead to significant weight gain later in life, although “exactly how this works is unknown,” Waterland said.
Another factor that plays into it is maternal obesity.
“We already know that maternal obesity during pregnancy promotes obesity in her offspring,” Waterland said. “It is likely that maternal obesity could interfere with this epigenetic development and we could see how this could end up leaving her child somewhat ill-equipped to properly regulate food intake and energy expenditure.”
In an earlier study also done on mice, Waterland said dietary supplements “prevented the transgenerational amplification of obesity,” which could be a solution moving forward.
The reason this study is of interest is because “we were able to demonstrate a direct association with human genetics,” Waterland said.
As obesity remains a major public health challenge, the study concludes, we hope our work will energize efforts to understand the developmental determinants of obesity risk.
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