The first potential new prescription weight-loss pill in more than a decade works, according to FDA staff who also flagged safety concerns that Wall Street deemed benign enough to bet the drug will ultimately hit pharmacy shelves.
The review from U.S. Food and Drug Administration staff on Tuesday, contained in documents released ahead of an FDA [...]
Patients who’ve lost weight after bariatric surgery breathe easier and take 50 percent fewer prescription breathing medications, a new study finds.
Researchers reviewed the medical records of 320 patients for one year before and after they had bariatric surgery at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. The patients filled a total of 324 prescriptions for breathing medications [...]
OBESITY surgery is soaring in popularity, but figures show for the first time that the benefits of the procedure for the average patient fall far short of the costs, making simpler alternative treatments better value for money.
A quarter of Australians over 18 were estimated to be obese in 2007-08, an 8.4 percentage point [...]
Having two obese parents may substantially raise a child’s risk of becoming obese, with mom’s weight playing a particularly important role, a new study suggests.
UK researchers found that among more than 7,000 2- to 15-year-olds in a national study, those who had two obese parents were 12 times more likely to be obese than children [...]
Researchers have identified at least six new gene mutations linked to obesity and said on Sunday they point to ways the brain and nervous system control eating and metabolism.
Joel Hirschhorn at Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston led a team called Genetic Investigation of Anthropometric Traits or GIANT to screen 15 different studies [...]
Breast cancer patients who are overweight have more aggressive disease and are likely to die sooner, U.S. researchers reported on Friday.
A dangerous type of breast cancer, known as inflammatory breast cancer, was seen in 45 percent of obese patients, compared with 30 percent of overweight patients and 15 percent of patients of healthy weight.
“The more [...]
The mix of bacteria in a baby’s gut may predict whether that infant will become overweight or obese later in life, a new study suggests.
Babies with high numbers of bifidobacteria and low numbers of Staphylococcus aureus may be protected from excess weight gain, according to a team of researchers from the University of Turku in [...]
Researchers in Sweden have discovered a protein that stimulates the formation of fat cells, a finding that could potentially be used to treat obesity, the Karolinska Institute said.
The protein, called TRAP (tartrate-resistant acid phosphatase), “stimulates the formation of new fat cells and can thus precipitate the development of obesity,” the Institute said in a statement.
The [...]
World governments focus too much on fighting terrorism while obesity and other “lifestyle diseases” are killing millions more people, an international conference heard Monday.
Overcoming deadly factors such as poor diet, smoking and a lack of exercise should take top priority in the fight against a growing epidemic of preventable chronic disease, legal and health experts [...]
Reducing the amount of salt that children eat could provide a short-cut to keeping them slim, British researchers reported on Wednesday.
They found that children who ate less salt drank fewer sugary soft drinks and could reduce their risk of high blood pressure and obesity.
Writing in the journal Hypertension, they said this could lower rates of [...]
