Sedentary lifestyle has created a
new life-threatening condition called obesity. Not just is obesity affects a
person’s mental health but makes the metabolism of an individual go haywire.
The very metabolic pathways (all the chemical reactions that occur in our body)
that evolved to ensure that humans keep functioning in conditions of starvation
get dysregulated due to several reasons and can cause weight gain in an
individual causing obesity. Some of the common lifestyle factors those
contribute to excessive weight gain include the familiar lack of exercise and
stress. Obesity is in turn a risk factor for numerous diseases including Type
II Diabetes Mellitus, Cardiovascular diseases, atherosclerosis and stroke.
Many of these diseases are interrelated with respect to how they develop in the
body and how one of these conditions can make you prone to developing a second
disease condition. For example, a person who has atherosclerosis is at risk of
developing cardiovascular disease and stroke. This interrelatedness has been
described as what is known as the Metabolic syndrome.
The usual factors that makes one
susceptible to developing a metabolic syndrome are:
1. An
increased waist circumference (WC)
Body mass index
(BMI) is not a great measure of obesity. WC is supremely better in
understanding the risks of fat deposition in the body and is used to understand
risk of developing metabolic syndrome as it measures the abdominal fat.
2. High
triglyceride (TGs) levels
Triglycerides are
the body’s way to prepare for starvation spells. It saves fats in fatty tissues
like abdomen which is a factor that contributes to waist circumference.
3. Low
blood HDL levels
HDL acts as a
sponge for cholesterol removing it from the body via transporting it to liver.
If its level reduces then there is a higher chance of plaque (cholesterol
deposition in blood vessels that cause atherosclerosis) formation.
4. High
blood pressure (BP)
As happens in
hypertension can lead to a higher chance of damage to blood vessels and in turn
development of those fatty plaques in your blood vessels.
5. High
blood sugar
This can cause
not just Diabetes but also increases your risk of developing heart diseases
because the excess glucose that is circulating in the blood stream gets converted
to fats and in turn increases your triglycerides.
As it can be
seen how all these above factors are so interconnected, which makes the
treatment of metabolic syndrome a little difficult unless a major lifestyle
change is done in terms of adopting an active lifestyle and taking a healthy
and balanced diet.
Another factor
that seems to be a puzzle piece in understanding metabolic syndrome is uric
acid levels in serum. Uric acid is produced by the breakdown of proteins that
we take in our diet. A common disease that happens if excess uric acid is
produced in the body is gout, which causes pain in joints due to accumulation
of uric acid derived crystals in joints.
According to Dr. Wen-Harn Pan, “We
noticed that Taiwanese experience almost the highest prevalence of
hyperuricemia in the world. We would like to know more about its impacts than
just gout. Our previous cohort studies found hyperuricemia as a strong
predictive factor on cardiovascular diseases (CVD) and urate-lowering treatment
can lower CVD incidence. Furthermore, our earlier study
in Han Chinese confirmed that genetically exposed to high blood uric acid
increased the risk of CVD events”
An increased
uric acid level is, thus, also seen to be associated with the same risk factors
that cause metabolic syndrome. This made scientists headed by Dr. Wen Harn Pen at
National Yang-Ming University, Taiwan to understand this link further by
conducting a study in which they measured serum uric acid levels of 10,000
Taiwanese along with measuring their WC, blood triglyceride, HDL, blood
pressure and fasting glucose levels.
Next, they found
specific genes variants (presence of a certain variant form of a gene can increase
your risk for developing a certain condition) that are found to be
associated with an increased waist circumference, HDL cholesterol and increased
serum uric acid, this gave them specific gene variants for all these three
conditions that if present can increase your likelihood of developing the
respective condition. What they did next may sound a little complicated, but it
comes down to understanding if the presence of these specific gene variant also
coincided with the presence of one of the metabolic disturbances like an
increased blood pressure, increased serum glucose level, increased triglyceride
levels, increased waist circumference, and decreased HDL levels.
This may be
understood as follows, if a person say has a gene variant B (of a specific gene
which has three variants A, B and C), then that person is at a higher risk of
developing increased blood pressure, but we don’t know what is the percentage
that this individual will develop increased blood pressure. This percentage or
chance can be measured by finding the number of individuals who have this gene
and then checking their blood pressure, now the ones who do have a higher blood
pressure can give us a percentage of how likely it would be for a person to
develop high blood pressure if he has this gene variant B.
The scientists
in this study found that people who have a risk of developing high serum uric
acid are also at risk of developing high blood pressure and high triglyceride
levels, both of which can cause metabolic syndrome. It isn’t clear if high uric
acid levels can also cause obesity, although obesity can cause high serum uric
acid levels. This points towards the likelihood that metabolic syndrome could
occur due to factors other than obesity.
“As
hyperuricemia and obesity are preventable, our findings are of relevance to
public health policy and practice, and uric acid control can be prioritized to
the same extent as obesity, dyslipidemia, and hypertension,” says Dr. Mahantesh
Biradar, who worked as a graduate student on this study and is also the first
author on this research article.
It would be
interesting to see in future studies how these other factors lead to metabolic syndrome
and it might serve as a tool for diagnosis and for managing this disease.
References
Original
article: The causal role of elevated uric acid and waist circumference on the
risk of metabolic syndrome components. International Journal of Obesity (Springer
Nature). 2019. Doi: 10.1038/s41366-019-0487-9 (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41366-019-0487-9)
Read more about
Metabolic syndrome here:
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