blog health 15

"Disrespectful treatment and medical fat shaming, in an attempt to motivate people to change their behavior, is stressful and can cause patients to delay health care seeking or avoid interacting with providers," presenter Joan Chrisler, PhD, a professor of psychology at Connecticut College, said during a symposium titled "Weapons of Mass Distraction -- Confronting Sizeism." Sizeism can also have an effect on how doctors medically treat patients, as overweight people are often excluded from medical research based on assumptions about their health status, Chrisler said, meaning the standard dosage for drugs may not be appropriate for larger body sizes. Recent studies have shown frequent under-dosing of overweight patients who were prescribed antibiotics and chemotherapy, she added. "Recommending different treatments for patients with the same condition based on their weight is unethical and a form of malpractice," Chrisler said. "Research has sho...

In a study out today in the journal  JCI Insights , scientists report that a drug called "URMC-099" reversed liver inflammation, injury and scarring in animals fed a diet high in fat, sugar and cholesterol. The diet was designed to replicate the Western fast food diet and recreate the features of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease found in people. The drug was well tolerated and the research team plans further testing in order to move URMC-099 into early phase human trials. Obesity often leads to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and estimates suggest that 64 million people have the disorder in the U.S. alone. Individuals with the most severe form of the disease, called non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), have inflammation and liver cell damage, which can lead to scarring, cirrhosis and liver cancer. Other than weight loss, there are no treatment options. Eating lots of fatty and sugary foods triggers inflammation in the liver and the body responds by sending immune...

A University of Colorado Cancer Center study published in the journal  Hormones & Cancer  offers a possible explanation: In an animal model of obesity and breast cancer (affectionately referred to as the "fat rat"), tumor cells in obese animals, but not lean animals, had especially sensitive androgen receptors, allowing these cells to magnify growth signals from the hormone testosterone. Similar to the way in which many breast cancers drive their growth with estrogen receptors, these tumors in obese rats drove their growth with androgen receptors. "Our original goal was to make a model of obesity and breast cancer that would reflect the condition in women. At first, we were disappointed to discover that rats don't make much estrogen in fat tissue like humans do. But we then realized that this aspect of the model gave us an excellent opportunity to study cancer progression after anti-estrogen treatment. Because fat cells in these rats don't make estrogen...