lunes, 31 de marzo de 2014

Poor sleep predicting obese adolescents risk of heart disease and diabetes

Obese adolescents not getting enough sleep? A study in today's The Journal of Pediatrics, shows they could be increasing their risk for developing diabetes, heart disease and stroke.

Lack of sleep and obesity have been associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases in adults and young children.

However, the association is not as clear in adolescents, an age group known for lack of adequate sleep, and with an obesity and overweight prevalence of 30 percent in the United States.

Researchers at the University of Michigan Health System and Baylor University studied 37 obese adolescents, ages 11-17. Their risk factors for type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, such as fasting cholesterol and blood sugar, waist circumference, body mass index, and blood pressure, were measured to create a continuous cardiometabolic risk score.

The adolescents were fitted with a physical activity monitor, worn 24 hours a day for seven days to measure typical patterns of physical activity and sleep.

One-third of the participants met the minimum recommendation of being physically active at least 60 minutes a day. Most participants slept approximately seven hours each night, usually waking up at least once. Only five of the participants met the minimal recommended eight and a half hours of sleep per night.

Even after controlling for factors that may impact cardiometabolic risk, like BMI and physical activity, low levels of sleep remained a significant predictor of cardiometabolic risk in obese teens.

This shows that even among those already considered at risk for cardiometabolic disease, in this case obese teens' decreased sleep duration was predictive of increased cardiometabolic risk. The study cannot determine whether lack of sleep causes cardiometabolic disease or if obesity, or other factors cause sleep disturbances.

"However, the strong association between sleep duration and cardiometabolic risk score independent of the effects of body composition and physical activity suggest a potential influence of sleep duration on cardiometabolic health in obese adolescents," says lead author Heidi IglayReger, Ph.D., supervisor of the Physical Activity Laboratory at the Michigan Metabolomics and Obesity Center.

These data provide evidence that objective sleep assessment may be a useful screening tool to identify at-risk adolescents.

Future studies are needed to determine if improving sleep duration would decrease the risk of developing cardiometabolic diseases.

Read more: diabetescare.net

Publicado por en No hay comentarios:

miércoles, 26 de marzo de 2014

Fat? Michelin Will Cut Your Pay

If you’re overweight or suffer from a disease like high blood pressure, you don’t want to work at Michelin North America.

If your waistline is larger than the tire manufacturer deems acceptable, or if you suffer from chronic hypertension, you’ll be charged $1,000 more for health care coverage. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, the company plans to monitor employees’ Body Mass Indices, blood pressure, glucose levels, triglycerides, and waist sizes. If your waist size is larger than 35 inches for women, or 40 inches for men, or if other metrics fall outside of the “acceptable” range, penalties kick in.

Michelin is far from the only company considering adding penalties; indeed, a survey indicated that six in 10 employers may impose penalties on employees who fail to meet arbitrary fitness criteria.

Companies say that programs like Michelin’s are required to force employees to be healthier — in other words, by charging someone extra for having the temerity to  be sick or outside of accepted norms for weight, employers will make everyone healthier. They add that incentive programs simply don’t work as well as penalties to motivate employees’ behavior.

Perhaps, if there was strong evidence that obesity was something that people could easily control, there would be merit to this, but as studies have repeatedly shown, this is simply not the case. Once a person is overweight, both body and mind fight any effort to lose weight. Indeed, over 99 percent of diets fail over a five-year period. This means that if an employee happens to be fat, they are extremely unlikely to lose weight no matter how hard they work, no matter how much willpower they show. Essentially, Michelin is planning to institute a $1,000 per year penalty that cannot be eliminated.

The same is true for people with hypertension. There are many different factors that can cause high blood pressure, and not all of them can be easily controlled. A person can’t work their way to better blood pressure; indeed, charging an employee $1,000 because of their stress-induced hypertension is hardly likely to make the problem go away.

It is certainly understandable that Michelin would want healthier employees, even if rising health care costs weren’t the driving factor behind it. Unfortunately, Michelin appears ready to embrace a policy that will punish its workers without improving health. Instead, it’s likely to stigmatize workers. Obesity’s cause is not gluttony, but genetics. It’s exacerbated by weird causes, like what kind of bacteria are in your gut. Punishing people who retain weight more than others is not going to make anyone healthier. Neither is punishing people for diseases like hypertension, or for the predisposition to diabetes.

Read more: care2.com
Publicado por en No hay comentarios:

miércoles, 19 de marzo de 2014

Diet Drinks and Body Weight

Overweight and obese adults who drink diet beverages take in more calories from solid foods—especially snacks—than those who drink sugary beverages, according to a new study. The findings raise questions about using diet drinks for weight control in heavier adults.

Excess weight can raise your risk for many health problems, including type 2 diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. Many people use diet drinks to help control their weight. But studies of how these beverages affect weight control have had mixed results.

To examine the link between diet drinks and calories, NIH-funded scientists looked at data on nearly 24,000 adults. The researchers found that about 10% of healthy-weight adults drank diet beverages, compared to about 20% of over-weight and obese adults.

Healthy-weight adults who drank diet beverages ate less food and fewer total calories on a typical day than those who drank sugared beverages.

Among adults who were over-weight or obese, total calorie intake was similar between those who drank diet or sugary beverages. Heavier adults who drank diet beverages tended to eat more calories in the form of solid foods.

Taking a look at solid-food intake, the scientists found that obese adults who consumed diet drinks ate significantly more calories per day in salty snacks and sweet snacks than those who drank sugared beverages.

“The results suggest that overweight and obese adults looking to lose or maintain their weight—who have already made the switch from sugary to diet beverages—may need to look carefully at other components of their solid-food diet,” says study coauthor Dr. Sara N. Bleich at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Publicado por en No hay comentarios:

jueves, 13 de marzo de 2014

Medical emergency motivates couple to lose 538 pounds

At work one day, IT consultant Justin Shelton suddenly began to feel ill. A few hours later, he was in the emergency room, and doctors told him he might have a kidney infection.

They just needed to run a scan to confirm the diagnosis.

The next words were a cold reality check: The imaging machine could not support his weight.

"They told me, 'We think you have a kidney infection, but we can't confirm for sure, so we're just going to treat it aggressively and hope that's what it is,' " Shelton said.

He was 25 years old and weighed 592 pounds.

Two years earlier, Justin's wife, Lauren Shelton, had had her own medical scare; her gallbladder had to be removed because of weight-related complications. At her heaviest, Lauren weighed 341 pounds.

Their size made everyday tasks difficult, too. Years ago, Lauren was on a plane, and the seat belt wouldn't buckle. She was mortified and tried to hide from the flight attendants that she didn't fit into the seat.

Both Lauren and Justin had been asked not to get on rides at a theme park because of their size.
Couple lost a combined 500 pounds

But Justin's trip to the emergency room was the final straw. The Jefferson City, Tennessee, couple realized something needed to change.

How she lost 100 pounds: Hard work

Luckily for Justin, doctors were right and able to treat his kidney infection without the scan. "It made me think, 'What if it was something else? What if it was more serious? What would I have done then?' " Justin said.
 
Wife loses 100 lbs., stuns Army hubby

So in February 2012, the couple began a 19-month journey to take control of their health.

Early struggles

"I was always bigger than the other kids, but the pounds really started packing on during high school and continued to do so over the next several years," Lauren wrote on her blog, OvercomingO.com.

For Justin, it was a knee injury at age 13 that kept him from playing sports. The exercise went away, bad eating habits continued, and his weight got out of control.

The Sheltons met online seven years ago, and their relationship revolved around their eating habits. They would go out to eat and indulge in one unhealthy meal after another.

They knew that in order to get healthy, they needed someone to steer them in the right direction. So they sought help from a weight-loss management program at a local medical school.

A physician's assistant gave them guidelines on what they should and should not be eating, and on the amount of exercise they needed.

Justin and Lauren started their new exercise routine by doing simple activities such as walking around the park and swimming. In late 2012, they joined a gym.

"We go to the gym five to six days a week and take one day off and try to do something fun and active like hiking or swimming," Lauren said.

The couple also started using a smartphone app to track the calories they consumed. In the beginning, they ate at restaurants only on special occasions and prepared all meals at home.

Lauren found recipes for healthier versions of the foods they loved. Their diet primarily consists of lean meats with lots of fruits and vegetables. Even today, everything they eat goes into a food journal.

The weight came off quickly at the beginning. Justin lost 25 pounds and Lauren lost 30 pounds during the first month alone. They tried to keep the weight loss steady after that, knowing they couldn't expect to see such a big number month after month without being disappointed.

Weekly weigh-ins helped them track their progress.

"We have graphs that show our weight loss through an app. It helps us stay motivated and get through the hard weeks," Justin said.

In just 19 months, Justin dropped 362 pounds and Lauren lost 176, for a total of 538 pounds.

'Nobody is perfect'

As they begin to move into the maintenance phase of their diet, the couple has allowed themselves to indulge once in a while. They now have what they call their Special Sunday Meal, where they will cook something they don't typically have during the week.

"This Sunday, we may have grilled turkey burgers on a whole-wheat bun with some oven-baked potatoes," Lauren said. "Typically, we do not have starches very often and do not keep breads in the house."

They still give in to cravings from time to time. Lauren says she has a sweet tooth, but she controls cravings by distracting herself with activities such as walks or naps.

What keeps her on track is understanding that "No matter how many times you slipped or messed up, you just have to start over, and eventually you'll get there," she said. "You have to stay positive and remind yourself that you're human and nobody is perfect."

Even though they've managed to lose a substantial amount of weight -- Lauren went from a size 32 dress to a size 12, and Justin went from size 58 pants to a size 36 -- the couple struggles with the psychological side effects of such a massive physical change.

Self-image has been an obstacle for both Lauren and Justin. They admit to having moments when they still see themselves as the obese people they used to be.

Read more: cnn.com

Publicado por en No hay comentarios:

martes, 4 de marzo de 2014

Major step in preventing type 2 diabetes

An international team led by researchers at the Broad Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), both Harvard affiliates, has identified mutations in a gene that can reduce the risk of individuals developing type 2 diabetes, even in people who have risk factors such as obesity and old age.

The results focus the search for developing novel therapeutic strategies for type 2 diabetes: If a drug can be developed that mimics the protective effect of these mutations, it could open up new ways of preventing this devastating disease.

Type 2 diabetes affects more than 300 million people worldwide and is rising rapidly in prevalence. Lifestyle changes and existing medicines slow the progression of the disease, but many patients are inadequately served by current treatments. The first step to developing a new therapy is discovering and validating a “drug target” — a human protein that, if activated or inhibited, results in prevention and treatment of the disease.

The current study breaks new ground in type 2 diabetes research and guides future therapeutic development in this disease. In the study, researchers describe the genetic analysis of 150,000 patients showing that rare mutations in a gene called SLC30A8 reduce risk of type 2 diabetes by 65 percent. The results were seen in patients from multiple ethnic groups, suggesting that a drug that mimics the effect of these mutations might have broad utility around the globe. The protein encoded by SLC30A8 had previously been shown to play an important role in the insulin-secreting beta cells of the pancreas, and a common variant in that gene was known to slightly influence the risk of type 2 diabetes. However, it was previously unclear whether inhibiting or activating the protein would be the best strategy for reducing disease risk — and how large an effect could be expected.

“This work underscores that human genetics is not just a tool for understanding biology: It can also powerfully inform drug discovery by addressing one of the most challenging and important questions — knowing which targets to go after,” said co-senior author David Altshuler, deputy director and chief academic officer at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT and a Harvard Medical School professor at MGH.

The Nature Genetics study grew from a research partnership that started in 2009 involving the Broad Institute, MGH, Pfizer Inc., and Lund University Diabetes Centre in Sweden, which set out to find mutations that reduce a person’s risk of type 2 diabetes. The research team selected people with severe risk factors for diabetes, such as advanced age and obesity, who never developed the disease and in fact had normal blood sugar levels. They focused on a set of genes previously identified as playing a role in type 2 diabetes and used next-generation sequencing (then a new technology) to search for rare mutations.

The team identified a genetic mutation that appeared to abolish function of the SLC30A8 gene and that was enriched in nondiabetic individuals studied in Sweden and Finland. The protection was surprising, because studies in mice had suggested that mutations in SLC30A8 might have the opposite effect — increasing rather than decreasing risk of type 2 diabetes. However, because this particular genetic variation was exceedingly rare outside of Finland, it proved difficult to obtain additional evidence to corroborate the initial discovery by the Broad/MGH/Pfizer/Lund team.

Read more: harvard.edu




Publicado por en No hay comentarios:
Suscribirse a: Entradas (Atom)