Obesity Reviews: obesity and aging may have similar effects

February 27, 2020 / Biovalley / it is estimated that 1.9 billion adults and 380 million children around the world are overweight or obese According to the World Health Organization, more and more people are dying of being overweight rather than underweight In response, Concordia's researchers are urging health authorities to reconsider their treatment of obesity In a paper recently published in the Journal of objective review, researchers believe that obesity should be regarded as "premature aging" They studied how obesity predisposes people to diseases commonly seen in the elderly: impaired genome, weakened immune system, decreased cognitive ability, increased risk of type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, cardiovascular disease, cancer and other diseases (image source: www Pixabay Com) Santosa, the author of the article and the second level chairman of clinical nutrition research in Canada, explained: "we are trying to comprehensively put forward the argument that obesity is parallel to aging Indeed, the development mechanism of obesity and aging is very similar " This paper discusses the way that obesity affects human aging from several different perspectives Many previous studies have linked obesity to premature death But at the molecular level, obesity is one of the factors that directly accelerate aging, the researchers point out For example, Santosa and her colleagues studied the process of apoptosis and autophagy, which are often associated with aging Studies have shown that apoptosis induced by obesity has been observed in the heart, liver, kidney, neurons, inner ear and retina of mice Obesity also inhibits autophagy, which can lead to cancer, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and Alzheimer's At the genetic level, the researchers wrote, obesity affects many aging related changes, including the shortening of a structure called telomeres at the end of chromosomes For example, the telomeres of obese patients may be more than 25% shorter than those of the control group Santosa and her colleagues further point out that obesity has similar effects on cognitive decline, mobility, hypertension and stress as aging In addition, obesity accelerates the aging of the immune system by targeting different immune cells, and does not necessarily reverse with weight loss The effect of obesity on the immune system in turn affects susceptibility to diseases such as influenza The incidence rate of influenza is higher in obese patients than in normal weight people Finally, this paper explains how obese individuals are more likely to suffer from diseases closely related to aging, such as type II diabetes, Alzheimer's disease and various forms of cancer The authors believe the study will help people better understand how obesity works and inspire ideas about how to treat it (bio Com) information source: new study shows the effects of objectivity mirror those of aging original source: Bjorn T Tam et al, objectivity and aging: two sides of the same coin, objectivity reviews (2020) Doi: 10.1111/obr.12991