In NewScientist (28 July 2018, paywall) Clare Wilson reports on a the theory that obesity might be caused by a virus:
In humans, adenoviruses usually cause colds, diarrhoea or eye infections. For ethical reasons, we can’t just inject adenovirus-36 into people and see if they put on weight. Instead, Dhurandhar and other groups looked to see whether people who are overweight are more likely to have antibodies to this virus – a sign that their immune systems have encountered it. They found that they did: one US study, for instance, reported that 30 per cent of obese people had these antibodies, compared with 5 per cent of those who were a healthy weight.
Now Wilmore Webley at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has searched for the virus itself in people, rather than antibodies. His team looked at 80 biopsies taken from women with breast cancer. Analysing healthy breast tissue from them, the team found that 81 per cent of the samples from overweight women contained the virus, while just 19 per cent of samples from healthy-weight women did. “That is a big difference,” says Webley. The findings were presented at a conference of the American Society for Microbiology in Atlanta, Georgia.
It’s interesting that the focus is on the virus. Is it not possible that the cause of the obesity is the antibodies themselves?
