How do you measure someone’s health? In recent years, correlating someone’s BMI and their overall health has fallen out of favor. “BMI is just one data point, along with many others, that needs to be considered to determine a person’s health,” Yale’s Wajahat Mehal, MD told Yale Medicine in 2023. The latest sign that someone’s weight and height are not the only factors to ponder when it comes to your health comes from a paper published this week in Nature Medicine, which neatly illustrates the more paradoxical aspects of genetics and the human body.
That paper explored a particular genetic mutation, MC4R deficiency, that can raise the risk of someone with this mutation becoming obese. There’s another side to that as well, though: the paper’s authors note that the same mutation can also result in “lower lipid levels and a lower risk of cardiovascular disease.”
These researchers also found two distinct groups of people for whom, as they phrased it, “MC4R deficiency is associated with significantly lower concentrations of total cholesterol, LDL-cholesterol and TGs, with no effect on HDL-cholesterol.” While the paper’s authors caution that there are “several limitations” in this study, including the number of subjects involved, this does represent a step forward in better understanding the relationship between the brain and the human metabolism.
One of the study’s authors, Sadaf Farooqi of the University of Cambridge, explained more about the paper’s findings in comments made to Nature. “The protection from cardiovascular disease is very striking,” Farooqi said regarding the MC4R mutations. It’s unclear if these findings will be able to lead to drugs that can address heart health on a greater level, but even on their own, they represent an expansion of human knowledge on the body’s inner workings.
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