The Burrill Report


I sent my wife a note this morning suggesting I might be suffering from a virus. She is a tender pediatrician, but when it comes to adult medicine involving her husband, her bedside manner leaves something to be desired.

I was merely trying to keep her up on the medical literature, but she took it as a comment on my own extended state of being. It turns out obesity, like a cold, may be linked to exposure to a particular strain of adenovirus. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine found that children who had been exposed to adenovirus 36 were significantly more likely to be obese.

The researchers checked 124 kids for the presence of antibodies specific to AD36, the only human adenovirus currently linked to human obesity. AD-36 is one of more than 50 known adenoviruses, which cause respiratory, gastrointestinal and other infections. It’s the only adenovirus that’s been linked to obesity.

Just more than half of the kids in the study were considered obese. The researchers found neutralizing antibodies specific to AD36 in 19 of the children or 15 percent. Of those kids, 78 percent were obese. The study, published in the online edition of the journal Pediatrics, found that kids who were AD36-positive weighed almost 50 pounds more, on average, than children who were AD36-negative. Within the group of obese children, those with evidence of AD36 infection weighed an average of 35 pounds more than obese children who were AD36-negative.

“Many people believe that obesity is one’s own fault or the fault of one’s parents or family,” says Jeffrey B. Schwimmer, associate professor of clinical pediatrics at UC San Diego and one of the authors of the study. “This work helps point out that body weight is more complicated than it’s made out to be. And it is time that we move away from assigning blame in favor of developing a level of understanding that will better support efforts at both prevention and treatment. These data add credence to the concept that an infection can be a cause or contributor to obesity.”

How the infection causes obesity or why it leads to obesity in some people but not others is not understood. It is also not known whether the weight gain is the result of an active infection or a lasting change in someone’s metabolism. Schwimmer says in cell cultures, the virus does infect immature fat cells and accelerates their development and causes them to proliferate.

I did suggest to my wife that perhaps I caught a virus. Her curt email response was “Nice excuse to not have to do anything about it!”

I never suggested that I would do nothing. But instead of hitting the gym and counting calories, I’m willing to first try a little Nyquil syrup on my ice cream.



September 24, 2010
http://www.burrillreport.com/article-childhood_obesity_may_be_triggered_by_a_viral_infection_.html