Might infection help make kids obese?
Could a childhood infection trigger obesity? Provocative new research published yesterday in the journal Pediatrics adds weight to the growing body of evidence that obesity isn’t only a matter of behavior or genetics. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine checked 124 children (median age 13.6 years) for the presence of antibodies to a virus known as AD36, an adenovirus that can cause upper respiratory tract or gastrointestinal illness and that has been associated in earlier studies with obesity. Sixty-seven of the children were obese, and 57 were not. Researchers found evidence of such antibodies in 19 children altogether. Of those children, 15 – or 79 percent – were obese. Moreover, AD36 antibodies were more common among the obese children (15 out of 67) than in those who were not obese (4 of 57). Finally, the children who had AD36 antibodies were, on average, nearly 50 pounds heavier than those without the antibody. One-third of U.S. children are o
