Obesity may be transmitted from person to person by adenoviral infection, like the one that causes acute respiratory disease. Such are the results of research by scientists from the University of California, San Diego. The Independent wrote about it referring to the journal Pediatrics.
During observations of 124 children aged 8 to 18 years, “adenovirus 36” was discovered in more than 20% of “obese” and in less than 6% of the rest; in turn, four of the five carriers of “adenovirus 36” were diagnosed with obesity. Laboratory studies have shown that the virus infects immature adipose tissue cells accelerating their growth and reproduction.
Head of the research group Jeffrey Schwimmer noted that the assumption of viral nature of obesity ten years ago was first suggested by a professor of Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana, Nikhil Dhurandhar: he noticed that chickens that died during an epidemic caused by adenovirus in India in the 1980s were plump and not deflated as expected.
Source of the image: Telegraph.
