Tag Archives: fat

Surgeons to test fat busters

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Orlando:Studies to test whether fat dissolving body treatments work are to be carried out by the US cosmetic surgeons body, the American Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (ASAPS).

The decision to hold a double-blind placebo study follows the increasing popularity of treatments such as mesotherapy in which vitamins and other substances are given in multi-injections and more recently another treatment, which gained popularity in Brazil, known as Lipodissolve, in which a substance only medically approved for reducing blood cholesterol was injected into fatty areas. The latter has been banned for use in beauty treatments in most parts of Europe and the US.

ASAPS wants to determine if these practices are safe and work, it said at the annual meeting of the Aesthetic Society in Orlando, Fla.

Mesotherapy was developed as a separate medical specialty in France in the early 1950s, and many mesotherapy centers are opening in the United States.

The treatment involves the injection of various compounds into the skin in order to break down fat cells, but the absence of proper protocols and regulation of this therapy may put patients at risk. The goal of the study is to provide doctors and patients with more specific and standardized protocols, as well as more information about the possible risks and benefits of this therapy.

Dr Mark Jewell, President of ASAP said: “Our goal is to provide physicians and their patients with the information they need to make good decisions. Currently, we cannot endorse the injection of phosphatidylcholine, sodium deoxycholate, or any drugs, vitamins, plant extracts or hormones into subcutaneous fat as practiced in mesotherapy/Lipodissolve treatments, because we don’t have enough clinical data or FDA approval to support their use.”

The study is designed by the Aesthetic Society and funded by the Aesthetic Surgery Education and Research Foundation. The findings are expected to be published in the Aesthetic Surgery Journal, the peer-reviewed journal of the ASAPS.

Fat middle may raise risk of Alzheimer’s

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San Diego: A fat middle may raise the risk of Alzheimer’s, say doctors.

A new study looked at 9,000 men and women whose fat levels were monitored in early middle-age. During the next 23 years, 221 cases of Alzheimer’s were diagnosed mostly in those who were overweight with higher levels of at around the trunk.

The research took into account other Alzheimer’s factors, such as high blood pressure, diabetes, stroke and high cholsterol but concluded that fat around the middle was the most likely predictor of dementia.

Dr Rachel Whitmer from the Kaiser Permanent Foundation Research Institute in California told the American Academy of Neurology in San Diego that even a person of normal weight who was carrying more fat around the trunk was at risk.

The team now plan to test whether weight loss can reduce the risk of demantia and Alzheimer’s.

Fat midriff doubles women’s chances of gallstone surgery

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Lexington: A bulging midriff almost doubles a woman’s chances of developing gallstones and the need for surgery to remove them, finds an extensive study published in the medical magazine Gut.

In the developed world, gallstone disease is the most common abdominal illness requiring admission to hospital. And in the USA, more than 800,000 operations to remove gallstones are carried out every year. Most gallstones are nuggets of cholesterol.

The findings are based on comprehensive two yearly monitoring of more than 42,000 women in the United States, who were part of the Nurses Health Study.

The women were all aged between 39 and 66 in 1986, when the gallstone study began. None of the women had gallstones. All provided waist and hip measurements and details of their normal diet.

During the subsequent monitoring period to the year 2000, 3197 women required gallstone surgery.

After taking into account total body fat distribution as well as other risk factors for gallstone disease, women with waists of 36 inches or more were almost twice as likely to require surgery to remove gallstones as those whose waists measured 26 inches or less.

Waist to hip ratio, which divides the waist size by hip size, also boosted the risk by around 40% among women with a ratio of 0.86 compared with those whose ratio was 0.70 or less.

These results held true even if a woman was not generally overweight, as determined by body mass index.

The authors suggest that there are plausible biological explanations for a link between gallstones and the midriff bulge. The type of fat around the waist is more metabolically active than fat elsewhere on the body.

And previous research has also linked gallstones with the metabolic syndrome, a feature of which is excess abdominal fat.

UK women have lowest life expectancy in Europe, says new report

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London: UK women have the lowest life expectancy in the European Union, according to a new report from the Office of National Statistics. But UK men are living longer than most in other European countries.

In a major report based on official statistics, the life expectancy for English men is 76.6 years, the second highest in the European Union which had an average male life expectancy of 74.8.

English women live longer than men, with a life expectancy of 80.9 years, but fare less well in comparison with the EU, where women live to 81.1 years on average. However, Britain is the second “fattest” nation in the EU, with more than a fifth of adults deemed obese, a figure second only to Greece.

Scotland has the lowest life expectancy for men (73.8 years) and women (79.1 years), and the greatest proportion of heavy smokers, a fact reflected in it also having the highest rate of lung cancer.

Wales has the lowest death rate among infants in 2003 and the highest proportion of disabled people in 2003-04.

In Northern Ireland in 2003, 17 per cent of 15-year-olds have some teeth missing due to decay. In England the figure is five per cent

Among the most worrying trends in the report, United Kingdom Health Statistics, was the level of sexually transmitted diseases, which was highest in England. The English rate of gonorrhoea infections in men was more than twice the rate for Scotland and Wales, and the English rate in women was twice the rate for Wales and four times that for Scotland.

Despite a rather poor impression of public health in Scotland, the country had the highest proportion of people taking part in high levels of physical activity, at all ages from 26 onwards.

In the UK, the most common type of health problem reported was arthritis and back pain, affecting about a third of men and women.One person in seven said they had considered suicide at some point.Anxiety and depression was suffered by seven per cent of men and 11 per cent of women.

Being overweight can be good for your health, says new CDC study

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Being a little overweight is good for you, a study suggests, but being very thin increases the risk of death, according to the research.

The findings are the result of an analysis by the US watchdog, the Centre for Disease Control. Considered the most comprehensive ever undertaken, it agrees with several smaller studies in recent months.

All show that those who are a little overweight have a lower risk of death than those of normal weight.

As a result, U.S. government experts have dramatically cut the annual number of deaths they blame on people being overweight – from 365,000 to just 25,814.

It means that, officially, more people – 34,000 – now die each year in the U.S. because they are underweight rather than overweight.

Most of these are aged 70 or older. The experts say the definition of a desirable weight range is probably now too low.

They emphasise, however, that there is a difference between being overweight, and being obese – obesity is still a major killer.

Researcher Dr David Williamson, who is overweight himself, said: ‘If I had a family history – a father who had a heart attack at 52, or a brother with diabetes – I would actively lose weight. As it is, I’m comfortable with my size.’ The experts have changed their views on fat and thin people because the new study used more recent data and better statistical techniques, including factors such as smoking, age, race and alcohol consumption.

Based on the new calculations, excess weight drops from the second leading cause of preventable death – after smoking – to seventh.

Biostatistician Mary Grace Kovar said the classification for normal weight is now probably set too low. In addition, ‘overweight’ people are eating more healthily, exercising more, and controlling their blood pressure and cholesterol better than they used to.

The current method of defining obesity calculates BMI, or body-mass index, a person’s weight-to-height ratio. It has been criticised for labelling superfit athletes obese because muscle weighs more than fat.