Doctors plead for obesity to be recognized as a brain disorder. We explain why.
- According to the WHO, the number of cases of obesity in the world has almost tripled since 1975.
- In 2019, 38 million children under the age of 5 were overweight or obese.
More than 8 million adults are obese in France, i.e. 17% of the population, according to the Ministry of Solidarity and Health. At the World level, 650 million people are affected by this problem, according to the World Health Organization. This represents 13% of the world’s adult population, of which 11% are men and 15% are women.
Obesity, a brain disorder that develops during childhood
Obesity can be defined as an abnormal or excessive accumulation of body fat that can impair health. We speak of obesity when the body mass index (BMI) is equal to or greater than 30. This is obtained by performing the following operation: the weight divided by the square of the height.
A person can become obese by eating in excessive quantities but not only… According to a published study in the review ScienceAdvance, this weight gain could be linked to a brain disorder possibly visible since childhood. The researchers therefore plead for obesity to be recognized as such, in the same way as autism or Asperger’s syndrome.
Changing a brain area during childhood promotes obesity
In detail, scientists have discovered that part of the brain undergoes many changes during childhood. During this period, if it is impacted in some way, it can influence how future body weight will be regulated. In other words, if this part of the brain undergoes changes during childhood, future adults will be more likely to gain weight later.
Obesity kills more people than underweight
Another lesson from the researchers: these changes occur earlier in women than in men. “We believe that public health interventions aimed at curbing the global obesity epidemic should consider obesity more as a neurodevelopmental disorder”says Dr. Harry MacKay, one of the authors.
In the future, researchers intend to continue their research to better understand this phenomenon and, eventually, perhaps find new ways to detect and treat obesity… A necessity because, according to the WHO, “most of the world’s population lives in countries where overweight and obesity kill more people than underweight”.
Indeed, obesity remains a major risk factor for several pathologies such as heart and cardiovascular diseases or type 2 diabetes.
