A recent study conducted in Europe would lay land myths and legends on all kinds of miraculous diets. Scientists discovered quela duplication of a chromosome is related to be thin, while their lack of backup causes obesity.
People with a greater amount of certain genes are more likely to be very thin, said scientists in the first discovery of a genetic cause for extreme thinness. In a study published in the journal Nature, researchers at Imperial College London in Britain and the University of Lausanne, in Switzerland, found that a duplication of a portion of chromosome 16 is associated with being too thin.
Previous research had found that people with a lack of copies of these genes are 43 times more likely to suffer from morbid obesity. “This is the first genetic cause of extreme thinness that we have identified,” said Wednesday Philippe Froguel, the school of public health at Imperial College, who led the study.
“Is also the first example of a deletion and duplication of a portion of the genome has opposite effects,” he added. He said that one reason why this last discovery was important is showing that a deficit of childhood growth can be boosted genetically.
“If a child does not eat, is not necessarily an error of the fathers”, said. Normally, each person has a copy of each chromosome from each parent, which gives them two copies of each gene
But sometimes the sections of a chromosome may be duplicated or deleted, giving rise to an abnormal “dose” of genes, explained researchers in their study. But in about one in every 2,000 people, part of chromosome 16 is doubled, making men 23 times more likely to underweight women and 5 times more likely.
Is considered a weight low to have a body mass index (BMI), which associates the weight and the height below the 18.5. Froguel team examined for the study the DNA of more than 95,000 people. It was discovered that half of the children with the duplicated gene had been diagnosed with a “developmental delay”, which means that their rate of weight gain is significantly below the normal.
A quarter of people with duplication had microcephaly, a condition in which the head and brain are smaller than normal and which is related to neurological defects and short life expectancy
Froguel said that scientists still have much work to do to find out more about the genes in this area, but its discovery could lead to new potential treatments for obesity and appetite disorders. “Now plan to sort these genes and discover what they do, so we can get an idea of which are involved in the regulation of appetite”, stated.
