The Case for Medical Management of Obesity: A Call for Increased Physician Involvement

The United States is in the midst of an escalating epidemic of obesity. Over one-third of the adult population in the United States is currently obese and the prevalence of obesity is growing rapidly. By any criteria, obesity represents a chronic disease which is associated with a wide range of comorbidities, including coronary heart disease (CHD), Type 2 diabetes, hypertension and dyslipidemias. The comorbidities of obesity are common, occurring in over 70% of individuals with a BMI of ≥ 27. In addition to obesity itself, excessive accumulation of visceral abdominal fat and significant adult weight gain also represent health risks. Physicians have an important role to play in the treatment of obesity. Unfortunately, the medical community has not been involved actively enough to help stem the major epidemic of obesity occurring in the United States. This article puts forth a proposed model for the treatment of obesity in clinical practice, including obtaining the “vital signs” of obesity, recommending lifestyle measures, and instituting pharmacologic therapy when appropriate. By utilizing a chronic disease treatment model, physicians can join other health care professionals to effectively treat the chronic disease of obesity. Relatively modest weight loss, on the order of 510% of initial body weight can result in significant health improvements for many patients and represent an achievable goal for most obese patients.     

Fat Preference: A Novel Model of Eating Behavior in Rats

Obesity is a growing problem in the United States of America, with more than a third of the population classified as obese. One factor contributing to this multifactorial disorder is the consumption of a high fat diet, a behavior that has been shown to increase both caloric intake and body fat content. However, the elements regulating preference for high fat food over other foods remain understudied.To overcome this deficit, a model to quickly and easily test changes in the preference for dietary fat was developed. The Fat Preference model presents rats with a series of choices between foods with differing fat content. Like humans, rats have a natural bias toward consuming high fat food, making the rat model ideal for translational studies. Changes in preference can be ascribed to the effect of either genetic differences or pharmacological interventions. This model allows for the exploration of determinates of fat preference and screening pharmacotherapeutic agents that influence acquisition of obesity.     

Genome-Wide Association Study Reveals Genetic Architecture of Eating Behavior in Pigs and Its Implications for Humans Obesity by Comparative Mapping

This study was aimed at identifying genomic regions controlling feeding behavior in Danish Duroc boars and its potential implications for eating behavior in humans. Data regarding individual daily feed intake (DFI), total daily time spent in feeder (TPD), number of daily visits to feeder (NVD), average duration of each visit (TPV), mean feed intake per visit (FPV) and mean feed intake rate (FR) were available for 1130 boars. All boars were genotyped using the Illumina Porcine SNP60 BeadChip. The association analyses were performed using the GenABEL package in the R program. Sixteen SNPs were found to have moderate genome-wide significance (p<5E-05) and 76 SNPs had suggestive (p<5E-04) association with feeding behavior traits. MSI2 gene on chromosome (SSC) 14 was very strongly associated with NVD. Thirty-six SNPs were located in genome regions where QTLs have previously been reported for behavior and/or feed intake traits in pigs. The regions: 64–65 Mb on SSC 1, 124–130 Mb on SSC 8, 63–68 Mb on SSC 11, 32–39 Mb and 59–60 Mb on SSC 12 harbored several signifcant SNPs. Synapse genes (GABRR2, PPP1R9B, SYT1, GABRR1, CADPS2, DLGAP2 and GOPC), dephosphorylation genes (PPM1E, DAPP1, PTPN18, PTPRZ1, PTPN4, MTMR4 and RNGTT) and positive regulation of peptide secretion genes (GHRH, NNAT and TCF7L2) were highly significantly associated with feeding behavior traits. This is the first GWAS to identify genetic variants and biological mechanisms for eating behavior in pigs and these results are important for genetic improvement of pig feed efficiency. We have also conducted pig-human comparative gene mapping to reveal key genomic regions and/or genes on the human genome that may influence eating behavior in human beings and consequently affect the development of obesity and metabolic syndrome. This is the first translational genomics study of its kind to report potential candidate genes for eating behavior in humans.     

Physiology of Rana pipiens Reproductive Behavior: A Proposed Mechanism for Inhibition of the Release Call

SYNOPSIS. Non-gravid femaleRana pipiens clasped by sexuallyactive males emit a release call and thereby signal their unreceptivestatus to the clasping male. The receptive condition of gravidfemales is indicated by absence, or inhibition, of the call.This paper provides evidence that arginine-8 vasotocin (AVT)can inhibit the release call by causing water uptake when afemale is in an aquatic environment, and suggests that watermight exert this effect by means of a mechanical distensionof the body wall or internal pressure. This paper also includesevidence that the ovaries are not necessary for AVT's inhibitionof the call. The literature dealing with the physiological basisof female frog reproductive behavior and the physiological basisof the release call are reviewed.     

Estimation of Instantaneous Complex Dynamics through Lyapunov Exponents: A Study on Heartbeat Dynamics

Measures of nonlinearity and complexity, and in particular the study of Lyapunov exponents, have been increasingly used to characterize dynamical properties of a wide range of biological nonlinear systems, including cardiovascular control. In this work, we present a novel methodology able to effectively estimate the Lyapunov spectrum of a series of stochastic events in an instantaneous fashion. The paradigm relies on a novel point-process high-order nonlinear model of the event series dynamics. The long-term information is taken into account by expanding the linear, quadratic, and cubic Wiener-Volterra kernels with the orthonormal Laguerre basis functions. Applications to synthetic data such as the Hénon map and Rössler attractor, as well as two experimental heartbeat interval datasets (i.e., healthy subjects undergoing postural changes and patients with severe cardiac heart failure), focus on estimation and tracking of the Instantaneous Dominant Lyapunov Exponent (IDLE). The novel cardiovascular assessment demonstrates that our method is able to effectively and instantaneously track the nonlinear autonomic control dynamics, allowing for complexity variability estimations.     

The Hunting Apes: Meat Eating and the Origins of Human Behavior

The Hunting Apes: Meat Eating and the Origins of Human Behavior. Craig B. Stanford. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1999. 254 pp.     

Mukbang and Disordered Eating: A Netnographic Analysis of Online Eating Broadcasts

Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry - Mukbang is a recent Internet phenomenon in which video recordings of hosts eating large amounts of food are streamed on an online video platform. It originated...     

A Call to Honesty: Extending Religious Priming of Moral Behavior to Middle Eastern Muslims

Two experiments with Middle Eastern participants explored the generalizability of prior research on religious priming and moral behavior to a novel cultural and religious context. Participants in Experiment 1 completed a sentence unscrambling task with religious or non-religious content (in Arabic) before taking an unsupervised math test on which cheating was possible and incentivized. No difference in honesty rates emerged between the two groups, failing to extend findings from previous research with similar stimuli. Experiment 2 tested the effects of the athan, the Islamic call to prayer, using the same design. This naturalistic religious prime produced higher rates of honesty (68%) compared to controls who did not hear the call to prayer (53%).These results raise the possibility that the psychological mechanisms used by religion to influence moral behavior might differ between religions and cultures, highlighting an avenue of exploration for future research. The experiments here also address two growing concerns in psychological science: that the absence of replications casts doubt on the reliability of original research findings, and that the Westernized state of psychological science casts doubt on the generalizability of such work.     

Alcohol and Exercise Affect Declining Kidney Function in Healthy Males Regardless of Obesity: A Prospective Cohort Study

Background

Although lifestyle is associated with metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular diseases, there has been no sufficient evidence of lifestyles on incident chronic kidney disease (CKD). The purpose of this prospective cohort study is to investigate the effects of lifestyles on kidney function in healthy people.

Methods

A total of 7473 healthy people were enrolled in this Saitama Cardiometabolic Disease and Organ Impairment Study, Japan. Data on alcohol consumption, exercise frequency, and sleep duration were collected. The outcome event was incident CKD or decrease in estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) by >25% in 3 years.

Results

Subjects were classified into four groups according to body mass index and gender. Mean ± standard deviation of age was 38.8±10.5 years; eGFR, 78.1±15.2 ml/min/1.73m². In the male groups, multivariate logistic regression models showed that the outcome events were associated with a small amount of alcohol consumed (20 to 140g of alcohol/week) (ref. more than 140g of alcohol/week); non-obese male, adjusted odds ratio 1.366 (95% confidence interval, 1.086, 1.718); obese male (body mass index ≥25), 1.634 (1.160, 2.302); and with frequent exercise (twice a week or more) (ref. no exercise); non-obese male, 1.417 (1.144, 1.754); obese male, 1.842 (1.317, 2.577). Sleep duration was not associated with the outcome events.

Conclusion

These findings suggest that, regardless of obesity, a small amount of alcohol consumed and high exercise frequency were associated with the increased risk of loss of kidney function in the male groups.     

Obesity and psychotic disorders: uncovering common mechanisms through metabolomics

Primary obesity and psychotic disorders are similar with respect to the associated changes in energy balance and co-morbidities, including metabolic syndrome. Such similarities do not necessarily demonstrate causal links, but instead suggest that specific causes of and metabolic disturbances associated with obesity play a pathogenic role in the development of co-morbid disorders, potentially even before obesity develops. Metabolomics – the systematic study of metabolites, which are small molecules generated by the process of metabolism – has been important in elucidating the pathways underlying obesity-associated co-morbidities. This review covers how recent metabolomic studies have advanced biomarker discovery and the elucidation of mechanisms underlying obesity and its co-morbidities, with a specific focus on metabolic syndrome and psychotic disorders. The importance of identifying metabolic markers of disease-associated intermediate phenotypes – traits modulated but not encoded by the DNA sequence – is emphasized. Such markers would be applicable as diagnostic tools in a personalized healthcare setting and might also open up novel therapeutic avenues.     

A Model of Two-Way Selection System for Human Behavior

Two-way selection is a common phenomenon in nature and society. It appears in the processes like choosing a mate between men and women, making contracts between job hunters and recruiters, and trading between buyers and sellers. In this paper, we propose a model of two-way selection system, and present its analytical solution for the expectation of successful matching total and the regular pattern that the matching rate trends toward an inverse proportion to either the ratio between the two sides or the ratio of the state total to the smaller group''s people number. The proposed model is verified by empirical data of the matchmaking fairs. Results indicate that the model well predicts this typical real-world two-way selection behavior to the bounded error extent, thus it is helpful for understanding the dynamics mechanism of the real-world two-way selection system.     

Bacterial Succession on the Leaf Surface: A Novel System for Studying Successional Dynamics

Succession is a widely studied process in plant and animal systems, but succession in microbial communities has received relatively little attention despite the ubiquity of microorganisms in natural habitats. One important microbial habitat is the phyllosphere, or leaf surface, which harbors large, diverse populations of bacteria and offers unique opportunities for the study of succession and temporal community assembly patterns. To explore bacterial community successional patterns, we sampled phyllosphere communities on cottonwood (Populus deltoides) trees multiple times across the growing season, from leaf emergence to leaf fall. Bacterial community composition was highly variable throughout the growing season; leaves sampled as little as a week apart were found to harbor significantly different communities, and the temporal variability on a given tree exceeded the variability in community composition between individual trees sampled on a given day. The bacterial communities clearly clustered into early-, mid-, and late-season clusters, with early- and late-season communities being more similar to each other than to the mid-season communities, and these patterns appeared consistent from year to year. Although we observed clear and predictable changes in bacterial community composition during the course of the growing season, changes in phyllosphere bacterial diversity were less predictable. We examined the species–time relationship, a measure of species turnover rate, and found that the relationship was fundamentally similar to that observed in plant and invertebrate communities, just on a shorter time scale. The temporal dynamics we observed suggest that although phyllosphere bacterial communities have high levels of phylogenetic diversity and rapid turnover rates, these communities follow predictable successional patterns from season to season.