Summary: Some children may have a genetic predisposition to obesity — and a potential future test could help assess their risk.
By Stacey Feintuch | Posted: July 18, 2013
While poor diet and lack of exercise are often seen as the root cause for the obesity epidemic in America and other countries around the world, new research shows there may be more at play. Researchers from Southhampton, Exeter, and Plymouth universities recently found that a blood test can potentially reveal if a child will be obese — which means kids may be genetically more predisposed to being obese.
The research, published in the journal Diabetes, looked at a test that evaluates the levels of chemical changes (or epigenetic switches) in the PGC1a gene, which regulates the body's fat storage. Epigenetic switches are subtle changes in gene activity that happen through a chemical change called DNA methylation (which controls how genes work and is established early in life). The more switches, the greater the likelihood of obesity.
When the test was done on 5-year-olds, it predicted which kids would have a high body fat and a low body fat when they were older: A 10 percent rise in DNA methylation levels at 5 years old was linked to up to 12 percent more body fat at 14 years old. Test results were independent of the child's sex, physical activity level, or age at puberty.
Researchers looked at DNA samples from 40 children who participated in the EarlyBird project, a study of 300 children in Plymouth who were studied each year from age 5 to 14 on factors related to type 2 diabetes (such as how much they exercised and how much fat they had in their bodies). DNA was extracted from their blood samples. They cautioned that their findings need to be tested in larger groups of kids.
What's more, a number of recent studies have found that parents are likely to underestimate their kids own weight problems and think their children are a normal weight when they're actually overweight or obese. And obese children are much more likely to be obese as adults and face a higer risk than their normal-weight peers of lifelong medical problems including high cholesterol, diabetes, asthma, and cancer.
A concrete way to figure out if your child is at risk of becoming obese? Look at his body mass index. If you think your child is at risk, talk with your pediatrician, who can help make diet and fitness suggestions to help keep your child's weight in check early on, before he starts to gain too much weight.
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