Traditional Chinese Medicine in the treatment of common obesity.

A French team (Institut Pasteur de Lille/University of Lille/CNRS) recently studied the genes of 4236 people with increased body mass index (BMI).

Their study [1], published in the “International Journal of Obesity,” sheds new light on the management of patients with common obesity.

Obesity is a disease characterized by an excess of body fat. It is evaluated using the BMI (Weight / Height²), from which overweight (25 to 30), obesity (30 to 40), and morbid obesity (>40) are defined.

We distinguish:

- monogenic obesity, the rarest form (5%) that affects only one type of gene, particularly those that play a role in appetite control,

- and common obesity, the most frequent, resulting from a combination of genetic factors, involving mechanisms related to addiction and reward.

Professor Philippe Froguel, co-author of the study, explains that “body size is a genetic trait inherited at 70%.” During the research, a large number of human tissue samples (cardiac, adipose, pancreatic, brain tissues, etc.) were collected, on which RNA (and thus gene expression) was quantified.

In total, 106 susceptibility genes were studied, and most of them were highly expressed in the brain.