By Xinhua
Beijing : Some people might find it hard to believe that a virus could be blamed for obesity, but this is what U.S. researchers found and the finding may lead to possible obesity vaccine.
U.S. researchers said on Monday they found a commmon virus that causes adult human stem cells to turn into fat cells, thus explaining why some people become obese.
The target virus called adenovirus-36 (Ad-36), from a family of viruses that cause colds and pinkeye in people, caused animals to pack on the pounds in lab experiments.
“These animals accumulated a lot of fat,” said Nikhil Dhurandhar, an associate professor at Pennington Biomedical Research Center at Louisiana State University System.
Dhurandhar also has shown that obese people were three times more likely to have been infected with Ad-36 than thin people in a large study of humans.
Now, researchers in Dhurandhar’s lab have shown that exposure to the virus caused adult human stem cells to turn into fat-storing cells.
They obtained adult stem cells from fat tissue of people who had undergone liposuction and exposed the cells to the virus in the lab.
More than half the stem cells exposed to the virus turned into fat cells and accumulated fats, while only a small percentage of the non-exposed stem cells did the same, said researcher Dr. Magdalena Pasarica, who presented the results Monday at the American Chemical Society’s annual meeting in Boston.
If a viral cause of obesity can be confirmed, a vaccine could be developed, maybe within five to 10 years, to prevent the virus from making some people fat, Dhurandhar said. However, it wouldn’t help people already obese, he said.
“Certainly overeating has something to do with gaining weight. No doubt about that. But that is not the whole truth,” Dhurandhar said. “There are multiple causes of obesity. They range from simple overeating to genes to metabolism and perhaps viruses and infections.”