Heritability: The family roots of obesity : Nature : Nature Publishing Group
Heritability: The family roots of obesity
- Nature
- 508,
- S58–S60
- doi:10.1038/508S58a
- Published online
Scores of genes are implicated in obesity, but they cannot account for a family's predisposition to obesity. Are there other ways parents can influence their children?
Subject terms:
Katie Scott
Stephen O'Rahilly and Sadaf Farooqi, genetics researchers at the University of Cambridge, UK, have been on the hunt for the genes that drive obesity for more than 15 years. One of their first big breaks came in 1997, when two severely obese cousins from Pakistan were referred to them for a clinical assessment. The eight-year-old girl weighed 86 kg — as much as a tall man — and the two-year-old boy tipped the scales at 29 kg. No matter how much these children ate, they never felt full.
A quick blood test pointed Farooqi and O'Rahilly to the problem: both children lacked leptin, a hormone that regulates appetite. The scientists found that the cousins had a mutation in the gene responsible for leptin production — called ob for 'obese' — which had only recently been identified in mice1. The cousins provided the first irrefutable evidence that our genes can lead us to pile on the pounds. Researchers have since implicated dozens more genes.
“Obesity is one of the strongest genetically influenced traits we have.”
“Obesity is one of the strongest genetically influenced traits that we have,” says O'Rahilly. Classic twin studies in the 1980s and 1990s, which relied on pairs of identical and fraternal twins, suggest that 40–70% of variation in body size is due to genetic factors2.
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