The FTO gene has been giving work for years to researchers trying to discover the reasons why we gain weight. Its link with obesity has been known for months, but now scientists have taken a further step in understanding how it causes weight gain in people who have it “activated.”
According to the latest research, those people who have this gene “activated” also have higher levels of ghrelin in the blood, also known as “hunger hormone”. Basically, those who have the variant of the FTO in question, after eating they do not feel sufficiently satiated.
Many studies had looked at the importance of the FTO gene in laboratory animals, but it had not been so clearly certified in humans. To reach this conclusion, the researchers analyzed both blood samples and human scans. As Andrew Hattersley, a geneticist at the Peninsula Medical School in Exeter, UK, explains, “There is a lot of work on how FTO works in animals, but you have to be careful when applying it to people. It’s good to see the study done in humans. “
According to Rachel Batterham, author of the study published in the journal Journal of Clinical Investigation, from University College London, the work will serve to detect new therapeutic avenues against obesity. In fact, according to the researcher,there are already some experimental drugs that have been shown to be able to suppress ghrelin.
This gene is really important, since it affects one in six citizens and causes them to be 70 percent more prone to obesity.About 2.8 million adults die of excess weight each yearAnd, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 40 million children under the age of five were overweight in 2011.
Research is essential to further understanding obesity and its possible solutions, yet researchers know that it is only one piece of the entire process. According to Hattersley himself, “what we do not know is if FTO is changing many things that alter appetite, of which ghrelin is only one” to which he adds, “I suspect that appetite and obesity is more complex than just one hormone.
