Obesity should be reclassified as a brain disorder like autism or ADHD: Doctors

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Obesity should be considered a brain disorder like autism or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), says the doctors of a new study.

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Instead of treating obesity as a chronic behaviour disease, doctors from Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, who conducted the study, are suggesting that the disease be treated as a brain-development disorder.

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This would place obesity in the same classification as autism, ADHD and Asperger’s.

In the study, published in Science Advances, researchers looked at the development of one area of the brain, the arcuate nucleus.

This area of the brain is the “master regulator of food intake, physical activity and metabolism,” said Dr. Harry MacKay, one of the study’s authors and postdoctoral associate at the Baylor College of Medicine in a press release.

The study collected data from mice and observed the rodents’ epigenetics, which is the system of brain development that affect how genes work.

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The scientists compared the data from mice to those of humans in studies on obesity and noticed a “strong overlap” between both subjects’ genomic regions, which in humans, was associated with body mass index.

The researchers noticed that this area of the brain undergoes numerous epigenetic changes in very early childhood, which could affect how body weight can be regulated later in life.

“Our results provide new evidence that developmental epigenetics is likely involved in both early environmental and genetic influences on obesity risk,” MacKay said.

“Accordingly, prevention efforts targeting these developmental processes could be the key to stopping the worldwide obesity epidemic.”

According to Statistics Canada, roughly 7.3 million Canadian adults reported height and weight that classified them as obese in 2018.

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