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A COMMON virus that causes throat and eye infections may also play a role in obesity, according to scientists. Laboratory tests found the virus triggered changes in human fat tissue that left people with more, and larger, fat cells than people who were not infected.
The scientists acknowledge the virus may be only a contributing factor to growing obesity rates, but they believe that understanding how fat cells respond to infection could lead to vaccines to prevent weight gain and possibly to fat-promoting treatments for people with rare wasting conditions, such as lipodystrophy. The infection is three times more common in obese people and may explain the "healthy obese", who are substantially overweight but have healthy blood pressure and cholesterol levels.
Magdelena Pasarica and Nikhil Dhurandhar at Pennington biomedical centre, Louisiana State University, collected fatty tissue from 10 patients having liposuction. They extracted stem cells from the tissue and exposed half from each patient to adenovirus-36, a cause of respiratory tract infections, diarrhoea and conjunctivitis.
A week later, many stem cells exposed to the virus had been converted into early stage fat cells and begun storing fat. In samples that were not infected, a third as many stem cells had become fat cells.
