Grant: Operating Grant

Obesity is an increasingly important disease. Many more people are obese now than a generation ago. In 1981, 8.5% of Canadian adults and 2% of Canadian children were obese. Now, 16% of adults and 10% of children are obese. The 5-fold increase in pediatric obesity since 1981 worries doctors, because 75% of obese children will go on to become obese adults, and that means that diseases associated with obesity are on the rise. There has been a 10-to-30 fold increase in type 2 diabetes among North American children with in the past 10 to 15 years. We don't know enough about what goes wrong in an obese person's body that eventually leads to diabetes, heart disease or strokes. Some obese people get these diseases, and some don't. What is different about an obese person who gets sick, compared to a size-matched person that stays healthy? We plan to study people with rare, severe obesity disorders to look for genes that cause them to be very obese. We also plan to study their hormones and fat distribution to find out if some hormones and fat locations are worse than others. We hope that this information will teach us valuable lessons about what hormone pathways go wrong, and in what order, as obese people progress to diabetes and/or heart disease. Equally well, we hope to discover "paradoxically healthy" individuals (e.g. severely obese people with low blood pressure and high good cholesterol levels) who may help us find genes that could be activated to prevent disease.