Latest news with #NatureGenetics
News18
12 hours ago
- Health
- News18
What's Really Causing Obesity? It's Not Just Junk Food or Sitting Too Much
Globally, it's defined by a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 30 or above. But for Asian populations, including Indians, the danger zone begins at a lower BMI (≥25), thanks to our higher risk of developing metabolic issues even at modest weight levels, according to WHO guidelines. Factors Driving Obesity For a long time, physical inactivity was seen as the main cause of obesity. But a 2025 study published in PNAS and reported by The Washington Post challenges that belief. It highlights that high-calorie diets, especially those loaded with ultra-processed foods, are a major driver of obesity. Conducted across 4,000 individuals from various nations, the study found that daily energy expenditure is similar across lifestyles, from hunter-gatherers to urban office workers, suggesting that dietary excess, not lack of exercise, fuels weight gain in industrialised nations like India. While the debate continues between those who blame inactivity, those who blame diet, and those who believe both play a role, this study underscores the need to prioritise reducing processed food consumption in public health strategies. Dietary Factors: How the Indian Plate Has Changed Urbanisation and rising incomes have completely transformed how India eats. The once-wholesome Indian plate—filled with whole grains, lentils, and fresh vegetables—is increasingly being swapped for high-calorie, low-nutrient junk food. According to The Lancet (2019), urban Indian households now consume twice as many ultra-processed foods as rural ones. These products are often loaded with refined sugar and unhealthy fats, creating a steady surplus of calories. At the same time, fibre intake is falling. As per ICMR's 2020 dietary guidelines, less than 30% of Indians get enough daily fibre, which is troubling since fibre is essential for satiety and digestion. Even our snacking culture has shifted; roasted chana and fruits are being pushed aside by deep-fried snacks and sweets. The National Institute of Nutrition (NIN, 2019) directly linked frequent street food consumption to higher BMI in urban youth. The Sedentary Epidemic It's not just about what we eat; how little we move is another major part of the problem. Desk jobs, long hours in front of screens, and vehicle-heavy commutes have drastically reduced physical activity. According to the Indian Journal of Medical Research (2021), only 10–15% of urban Indians meet the WHO's recommendation of 150 minutes of moderate weekly exercise. The numbers are even starker for women. A BMJ Open (2020) study found that 40% of Indian women get less than 30 minutes of physical activity daily, largely due to cultural constraints and household demands. The result? More weight gain and a greater risk of long-term health issues. Biological Factors: Genes, Hormones, and More For Indians, biology itself adds to the challenge. Research published in Nature Genetics (2018) reveals that Indians are genetically predisposed to abdominal obesity, the most dangerous type, where fat accumulates around vital organs. This means we often face metabolic risks at much lower BMIs than people in the West. Hormonal issues also complicate things. PCOS affects about 20% of Indian women, and hypothyroidism is found in nearly 10% of adults, as per the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology (2020). Both conditions can lead to weight gain and make it harder to shed excess fat, even with lifestyle changes. Socioeconomic Factors: A Double-Edged Sword India's economic rise has brought better access to food, but not necessarily better nutrition. While people can afford more food variety, awareness around healthy eating hasn't kept up. According to the WHO's 2022 report, urban middle-class families now spend 20% more on packaged food than they did ten years ago. The latest NFHS-5 data (2019–21) reflects this trend starkly: 30% of urban women are obese, compared to 15% in rural areas. But rural India isn't far behind anymore; the numbers there are climbing too, hinting at a spreading crisis. Mind-Body Connection: The Emotional Side of Eating Mental and emotional health have a surprisingly big role in India's obesity story. The Indian Journal of Psychiatry (2021) found that 35% of urban Indians eat emotionally when stressed, typically reaching for high-calorie, sugary comfort foods. advetisement Sleep also plays a role. The ICMR (2020) found that sleeping less than 6 hours a night can double your risk of obesity. That's because poor sleep disrupts hormones that control hunger and fullness, making people more likely to overeat. Cultural Habits: When Celebrations Turn Caloric India's vibrant culture can also contribute to weight gain, especially during festivals, weddings, and family gatherings. NIN (2019) data shows that during Diwali or wedding season, people often consume 3000–5000 calories per day. That's well above the recommended intake. Even outside festivals, restaurant culture contributes to the problem. A Journal of Food Science study (2020) found that the average Indian restaurant meal is 1.5 times larger than what's nutritionally appropriate, encouraging chronic overeating. The Health Impact And How To Turn Things Around The ripple effects of obesity are serious. It's a major factor in India's diabetes epidemic (7.5% of adults) and is linked to 28% of all urban deaths from cardiovascular disease, according to The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology (2021). advetisement
Straits Times
4 days ago
- Health
- Straits Times
Discovery of 4 different subtypes of autism paves way for personalised care
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox Each subtype exhibits distinct developmental, medical, behavioural and psychiatric traits, and different patterns of genetic variation. The discovery of four different subtypes of autism is a major step toward understanding the condition's genetic underpinnings and improving care, researchers reported in Nature Genetics. According to researchers, the four autism subtypes can be categorised as: Behavioural Challenges, Mixed Autism Spectrum Disorder with Developmental Delay, Moderate Challenges, and Broadly Affected. Each subtype exhibits distinct developmental, medical, behavioural and psychiatric traits, and importantly, different patterns of genetic variation, the researchers said. The findings are drawn from a study of more than 5,000 children with autism, ages four to 18, and nearly 2,000 of their non-autistic siblings. The study looked for nearly 240 traits in each individual, from social interactions to repetitive behaviours to developmental milestones. While the four subtypes may share some traits – like developmental delays and intellectual disability - the genetic differences suggest distinct mechanisms are behind what appear on the surface to be similar characteristics. The timing of genetic disruptions and the effects on brain development differ with each subtype, researchers found. As a result, some of the genetic impact of autism may occur before birth, while other effects may emerge as children grow, according to the study. 'What we're seeing is not just one biological story of autism, but multiple distinct narratives,' study co-leader Natalie Sauerwald of the Flatiron Institute in New York said in a statement. 'This helps explain why past genetic studies (of autism patients) often fell short,' she said. 'It was like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle without realising we were actually looking at multiple different puzzles mixed together. We couldn't see the full picture, the genetic patterns, until we first separated individuals into subtypes.' REUTERS
Reuters
5 days ago
- Health
- Reuters
Health Rounds: New autism discovery paves way for personalized care
July 11 (Reuters) - The discovery of four different subtypes of autism is a major step toward understanding the condition's genetic underpinnings and improving care, researchers reported in Nature Genetics, opens new tab. According to researchers, the four autism subtypes can be categorized as: Behavioral Challenges, Mixed Autism Spectrum Disorder with Developmental Delay, Moderate Challenges, and Broadly Affected. Each subtype exhibits distinct developmental, medical, behavioral and psychiatric traits, and importantly, different patterns of genetic variation, the researchers said. The findings are drawn from a study of more than 5,000 children with autism, ages 4 to 18, and nearly 2,000 of their nonautistic siblings. The study looked for nearly 240 traits in each individual, from social interactions to repetitive behaviors to developmental milestones. While the four subtypes may share some traits – like developmental delays and intellectual disability - the genetic differences suggest distinct mechanisms are behind what appear on the surface to be similar characteristics. The timing of genetic disruptions and the effects on brain development differ with each subtype, researchers found. As a result, some of the genetic impact of autism may occur before birth, while other effects may emerge as children grow, according to the study. 'What we're seeing is not just one biological story of autism, but multiple distinct narratives,' study co-leader Natalie Sauerwald of the Flatiron Institute in New York said in a statement. 'This helps explain why past genetic studies (of autism patients) often fell short,' she said. 'It was like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle without realizing we were actually looking at multiple different puzzles mixed together. We couldn't see the full picture, the genetic patterns, until we first separated individuals into subtypes.' WEARABLES MAY IMPROVE CARE OF CHILDREN AFTER SURGERY Young children recovering at home after surgery might someday wear fitness trackers to speed detection of complications, new research suggests. Presently, surgeons must rely on the children themselves, or their parents, to describe new symptoms after hospital discharge. As a result, complications are not always caught at early stages. At the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago, 103 children each received a Google Fitbit - a commercially available activity, sleep and heartbeat monitor worn on the wrist like a watch - to wear for three weeks starting immediately after appendectomy. Rather than just monitoring the usual metrics captured by the Fitbit, the researchers modified the devices' algorithms to look for deviations from the circadian rhythms of a child's activity and heart rate patterns. The new algorithms were 91% accurate at flagging early signs of postoperative complications, up to three days before the children's doctors would later diagnose them, the researchers found upon reviewing the data. The devices were 74% accurate at identifying kids who were free of complications, they reported in Science Advances, opens new tab. Eventually the researchers hope to develop a real-time system that analyzes data automatically and sends alerts to children's clinical teams. 'By using widely available wearables, coupled with this novel algorithm, we have an opportunity to change the paradigm of postoperative monitoring and care — and improve outcomes for kids in the process,' study coauthor Dr. Fizan Abdullah said in a statement. (To receive the full newsletter in your inbox for free sign up here)
Time of India
5 days ago
- Health
- Time of India
New autism discovery paves way for personalized care
London: The discovery of four different subtypes of autism is a major step toward understanding the condition's genetic underpinnings and improving care, researchers reported in Nature Genetics. According to researchers, the four autism subtypes can be categorized as: Behavioral Challenges, Mixed Autism Spectrum Disorder with Developmental Delay, Moderate Challenges, and Broadly Affected. Each subtype exhibits distinct developmental, medical, behavioral and psychiatric traits, and importantly, different patterns of genetic variation, the researchers said. The findings are drawn from a study of more than 5,000 children with autism , ages 4 to 18, and nearly 2,000 of their nonautistic siblings. The study looked for nearly 240 traits in each individual, from social interactions to repetitive behaviors to developmental milestones. While the four subtypes may share some traits - like developmental delays and intellectual disability - the genetic differences suggest distinct mechanisms are behind what appear on the surface to be similar characteristics. The timing of genetic disruptions and the effects on brain development differ with each subtype, researchers found. As a result, some of the genetic impact of autism may occur before birth, while other effects may emerge as children grow, according to the study. "What we're seeing is not just one biological story of autism, but multiple distinct narratives," study co-leader Natalie Sauerwald of the Flatiron Institute in New York said in a statement. "This helps explain why past genetic studies (of autism patients) often fell short," she said. "It was like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle without realizing we were actually looking at multiple different puzzles mixed together. We couldn't see the full picture, the genetic patterns, until we first separated individuals into subtypes." WEARABLES MAY IMPROVE CARE OF CHILDREN AFTER SURGERY Young children recovering at home after surgery might someday wear fitness trackers to speed detection of complications, new research suggests. Presently, surgeons must rely on the children themselves, or their parents, to describe new symptoms after hospital discharge. As a result, complications are not always caught at early stages. At the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago, 103 children each received a Google Fitbit - a commercially available activity, sleep and heartbeat monitor worn on the wrist like a watch - to wear for three weeks starting immediately after appendectomy. Rather than just monitoring the usual metrics captured by the Fitbit, the researchers modified the devices' algorithms to look for deviations from the circadian rhythms of a child's activity and heart rate patterns. The new algorithms were 91% accurate at flagging early signs of postoperative complications, up to three days before the children's doctors would later diagnose them, the researchers found upon reviewing the data. The devices were 74% accurate at identifying kids who were free of complications, they reported in Science Advances. Eventually the researchers hope to develop a real-time system that analyzes data automatically and sends alerts to children's clinical teams.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
Four New Autism Subtypes Link Genes to Children's Traits
Stephen Shore, an autistic professor of special education at Adelphi University, has said: 'If you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism.' This quote is popular in the autism community and among researchers because it reflects something they grapple with all the time: the truly incredible diversity of experiences that fall under the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). 'The beauty of the autism spectrum is: it speaks to this heterogeneity. And the downside [is that] it covers up the differences,' says Fred Volkmar, a psychiatrist and a professor emeritus at Yale University. Right now individuals are placed on the spectrum based on the level of severity, from level 1 to level 3, of two different criteria: social communication difficulties and restricted, repetitive behaviors. Those coarse groupings, however, miss so much of the nuance. That's why researchers have spent decades trying to use genetics and behavioral characteristics to divide the spectrum into meaningful subtypes. The hope is that such subtypes can help guide care for autistic people and their families and reveal what causes different presentations of autism in the first place. Now, in a study published on Wednesday in Nature Genetics, researchers have bridged an important gap by connecting different clusters of behavioral and developmental traits with underlying genetic differences. By analyzing data from a group of 5,392 autistic children, they identified four distinct subtypes of autism, each with different kinds of challenges, that are connected to specific types of genetic variations. [Sign up for Today in Science, a free daily newsletter] 'For families navigating autism, understanding their child's specific subtype can provide greater clarity and open the door to more personalized care, support and connection,' says Natalie Sauerwald, co-lead author of the paper, who studies genomics at the Flatiron Institute in New York City. But it's not yet clear whether these four subtypes, which were identified with statistics in a nonrepresentative, largely white group of autistic kids, will be useful to help diagnose and care for autistic people in real-world clinical settings. When genetic sequencing of the human genome began in earnest in the 1990s, autism researchers hoped to identify the genetic cause—or more likely, causes—of the condition. 'Twenty years ago the geneticists were saying, 'We're not even going to need autism [as a diagnosis]; we're just going to have genetically defined disorders,'' says Catherine Lord, a psychologist specializing in autism at the University of California, Los Angeles. That hasn't come to pass. 'Autism genetics is very complex,' says the new study's co-lead author Aviya Litman, a genomics graduate student at Princeton University. Despite autism being between 60 and 80 percent heritable, it's hard to pin down a specific genetic cause for any one individual—the cause is only clear for about 20 percent of autistic people tested, Litman explains. Researchers have now identified hundreds of genes associated with autism, meaning that if an individual has certain genes, they have a much higher chance of being diagnosed as autistic. But even with this knowledge, scientists haven't been able to reliably connect how these genes translate to specific autistic traits and developmental trajectories. To bridge that gap, Litman, Sauerwald and their colleagues turned to data from a large study that tracked genetic information, traits and development of 5,392 autistic kids between the ages of four and 18. The researchers evaluated the young participants on social communication abilities, restrictive and repetitive behaviors, developmental milestones, and more. Using a computer model, statistical tests and clinical judgment, the team separated the participants into four robust groups based on patterns in their traits and development. Social and Behavioral Challenges: These kids, 37 percent of the participants, had more difficulty with social communication and restrictive and repetitive behaviors than other autistic children. They also had more challenges with disruptive behavior, attention and anxiety. These children, however, did not experience significant developmental delays. Mixed ASD with Developmental Delay: These kids, 19 percent of the participants, were more varied in their social communication and restrictive and repetitive behaviors, and they showed some developmental delays compared with nonautistic children. Moderate Challenges: These kids, 34 percent of the participants, had consistently fewer difficulties with social communication, restrictive and repetitive behaviors and other core autistic traits compared with other autistic children—though they still had more difficulties with them than nonautistic children. They did not have developmental delays. Broadly Affected: These kids, 10 percent of the participants, had more severe and wide-ranging difficulties with social communication, restrictive and repetitive behaviors and other core autistic traits, including developmental delays, compared with other autistic children. These groups still contained a lot of variation within them, but participants in each were more similar to one another than they were to participants in other groups. The four groups were also replicated in another, smaller population of autistic children. The researchers then analyzed genetic differences across the four groups and found that, remarkably, they had very distinct genetic profiles. 'To me, the biggest surprise was how different the four subtypes turned out to be.... The underlying genetics and biology are very different,' says Olga Troyanskaya, a genomics researcher at Princeton and the study's senior author. For example, different genes become active at different times in development—some become relevant before birth; others do so after. The Social and Behavioral Challenges group had more mutations in genes that became active after birth, Litman and Troyanskaya say, which could explain why these participants did not have developmental delays and tended to be diagnosed later than those in the other three groups. 'I expected these subtypes to have some differences in their biological underpinnings,' says Sauerwald, but the differences were even more pronounced than she expected, with very little biological overlap. These four groups aren't entirely unfamiliar to Volkmar and Lord, neither of whom were involved in the study. 'The groups make sense and follow lots of findings by other researchers,' Lord says. In that regard, the subtypes 'have a 'rediscovering the wheel' aspect,' Volkmar says—it's the connection to genetics that makes these results most noteworthy. These subgroups almost certainly don't cover the entire autism spectrum, given that the results were based on a sample that didn't represent the autistic population at large. The sample was 77 percent white, and some portions of the genetics results could only be performed for people with European ancestry because of limitations in available data. Also, some traits related to autism are rare and may not have been present enough in the sample to be picked up by the researchers' statistical measurements. 'This classification is not a definitive, comprehensive grouping,' Troyanskaya says. 'With additional data, more precise definitions of subtypes could emerge.' For Volkmar, the study 'speaks to the need to be a bit more fine-grained in our approaches to diagnosis,' he says. 'It spurs us to think about new approaches' to how to diagnose and understand autism—with subtypes rather than a single condition.
