Thursday, May 29, 2014

NEW

Obesity, overweight hits third of the world

A staggering 2.1 billion people now fat and no country immune, global analysis finds

The Associated Press Posted: May 29, 2014 9:47 AM ET Last Updated: May 29, 2014 10:10 AM ET
Obesity
Modernization has not been good for health, global obesity experts say. (Shutterstock)
Almost a third of the world is now fat, and no country has been able to curb obesity rates in the last three decades, according to a new global analysis.

Researchers found more than 2 billion people worldwide are now overweight or obese. The highest rates were in the Middle East and North Africa, where nearly 60 per cent of men and 65 per cent of women are heavy. The U.S. has about 13 per cent of the world's fat population, a greater percentage than any other country.  China and India combined have about 15 per cent.

"It's pretty grim," said Christopher Murray of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, who led the study. He and colleagues reviewed more than 1,700 studies covering 188 countries from 1980 to 2013. "When we realized that not a single country has had a significant decline in obesity, that tells you how hard a challenge this is."

Murray said there was a strong link between income and obesity; as people get richer, their waistlines also tend to start bulging. He said scientists have noticed accompanying spikes in diabetes and that rates of cancers linked to weight, like pancreatic cancer, are also rising.

The new report was paid for by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and published online Thursday in the journal, Lancet.

Last week, the World Health Organization established a high-level commission tasked with ending childhood obesity.

"Our children are getting fatter," Dr. Margaret Chan, WHO's director-general, said bluntly during a speech at the agency's annual meeting in Geneva. "Parts of the world are quite literally eating themselves to death." Earlier this year, WHO said that no more than 5 percent of your daily calories should come from sugar.

"Modernization has not been good for health," said Syed Shah, an obesity expert at United Arab Emirates University, who found obesity rates  have jumped five times in the last 20 years even in a handful of remote Himalayan villages in Pakistan. His research was presented this week at a conference in Bulgaria. "Years ago, people had to walk for hours if they wanted to make a phone call," he said. "Now everyone has a cellphone."

Shah also said the villagers no longer have to rely on their own farms for food.

"There are roads for [companies] to bring in their processed foods and the people don't have to slaughter their own animals for meat and oil," he said. "No one knew about Coke and Pepsi 20 years ago. Now it's everywhere."

In Britain, the independent health watchdog issued new advice Wednesday recommending that heavy people be sent to free weight-loss classes to drop about 3 per cent of their weight. It reasoned that losing just a few pounds improves health and is more realistic. About two in three adults in the U.K. are overweight, making it the fattest country in Western Europe.

"This is not something where you can just wake up one morning and say, 'I am going to lose 10 pounds,"' said Mike Kelly, the agency's public health director, in a statement. "It takes resolve and it takes encouragement."

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

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Scientists map proteins produced in human body

The Hindu - ‎1 hour ago‎
Thirteen years after the human genome was sequenced, two research groups have independently mapped the extent to which cells in various organs in the body turn many thousands of genes into proteins.
Mapped: largest range of proteins
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S & T » SCIENCE

Updated: May 29, 2014 04:39 IST

Scientists map proteins produced in human body

N. GOPAL RAJ
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IMPETUS TO RESEARCH: TUM researchers generated a comprehensive catalogue of human proteins from various tissues and organs. Photo: H. Hahne, Tum
IMPETUS TO RESEARCH: TUM researchers generated a comprehensive catalogue of human proteins from various tissues and organs. Photo: H. Hahne, Tum
Thirteen years after the human genome was sequenced, two research groups have independently mapped the extent to which cells in various organs in the body turn many thousands of genes into proteins.
From bacteria to humans, genes are made up of units of DNA, called base pairs. The sequence of base pairs in genes tell a cell's molecular machinery what proteins to produce. Ultimately, it is the proteins that carry out a myriad processes essential for life.
Once the over three billion base pairs that make up the human genome were sequenced, analysis of that data indicated that there are about 20,000 protein-coding genes.
In a paper just published in Nature, an international team of scientists led by Akhilesh Pandey of the Johns Hopkins University in the U.S and Harsha Gowda at the Institute of Bioinformatics in Bangalore has drawn up a draft map of proteins produced from 17,294 genes.
There was evidence for proteins coming from 18,097 human genes, reported Bernhard Kuster of Technische Universitaet Muenchen in Germany and his colleagues in a separate paper published in the same issue of the journal.
The two papers marked a “major advance”, providing comprehensive data about proteins expressed in different human tissues, commented R. Nagaraj of the Centre for Cellular & Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, who was not involved in either study.
Dr. Pandey and his colleagues examined proteins produced by normal cells in 30 tissue samples, adult and foetal as well as those found in blood. They found 'housekeeping proteins' from 2,350 genes that were produced in all tissues. On the other hand, proteins from 1,537 genes turned up in only one of the tissues. A number of proteins were expressed only during foetal development.
“The driving impetus for our work was to develop a reference of what is normal for human organs and cells,” said Dr. Pandey in an email. This information could provide clues to biologists seeking to elucidate the function of individual proteins. In addition, knowledge about organ-specific proteins could be used for detection of diseases arising in those organs.
“The day may not be too far when people have their protein profiles mapped, much like [personal] genome sequencing we have today. This could help us diagnose more diseases and diagnose diseases better too,” said Dr. Satish Chandra, Director of NIMHANS and a coauthor of the paper at a press conference in Bangalore.
In their paper, the researchers reported detecting proteins from 193 regions in the human genome that generally would not be expected to produce any, including genes considered dysfunctional. This suggested that “we do not yet have a thorough understanding of how our own genome works,” remarked Dr. Pandey.
Although proteins from about 84 per cent of all human genes had been found, those from the remaining genes may have eluded detection, remarked Dr. Gowda, a Wellcome Trust-DBT India Alliance Fellow. This could have occurred if the proteins were expressed in tissues or organs that had not been sampled. Alternatively, they might be expressed at very low levels, requiring special techniques to track down.
A large number of scientists at the Institute of Bioinformatics, a non-profit research organisation founded and headed by Dr. Pandey, contributed to the study. Researchers at the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education & Research in Chandigarh, the Armed Forces Medical College in Pune and the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences in Bangalore also participated.
In the other Nature paper, Dr. Kuster and his colleagues catalogued the proteins found in various human tissues, cell lines and body fluids. They found that approximately 10,000-12,000 proteins were ubiquitously expressed.
Hundreds of genes described in the human genome “apparently do not code for protein any more,” observed Dr. Kuster. One example was a family of proteins, involving some 800 genes, that are important for sensing smell and taste. But proteins could not be found from more than half of those genes.
“Our interpretation of that is that perhaps modern humans don't rely so much on their sense of smell and taste as we used to a long time ago. Therefore, evolution essentially gets rid of those surplus genes at some point,” he told this correspondent.
On the other hand, there were parts of the genome that had not been associated with protein-coding potential but for which proteins turned up. “So this could be a new playing ground, if you like, where nature tries out new proteins and we don't necessarily know what they do yet,” he remarked.
(with inputs from Divya Gandhi, Bangalore)