a child obesity is more than doubled over the past thirty years

resulting in both immediate and long term effects on health and will be

diet and exercise play a critical role in this epidemic but what's root causes

with two twenty million dollars and funding for the national institutes of health jodie can

a band a professor of psychology is conducting extensive research on the interplay of genetics

and the environment to better understand the other language factors in implications for treatment and

disease prevention

welcome back again of n

in studying obesity childhood obesity your work has focused on adopted children

you look at both birth an adoptive parents one

well we use an adoption design to tease apart the relative influences of genetic factors

prenatal factors

and environmental factors on the development of obesity or being overweight across childhood

and we're using this design because as you know adopted children shared environment with their

adoptive families but they don't share genes

on the other hand adopted children share genes with their biological parents

the where their birth parents

but they do not share a common environment

so in this type a design if we find that the adopted child's weight more

closely resembles their adoptive parents then we can conclude that there is something about the

environment that they share

that influences the weights of the parents in the children on the other hand if

we find that the adopted children's weights closely resemble their biological parents then we can

conclude that genetic factors may be operative

another important feature of the adoption design is that we can also tease apart prenatal

environmental influences from posting all environmental influences

and again this is because the biological mother creates the prenatal environment for the child

but in contrast the adoptive parents control the child's posting we find that

so that enables us to really tease apart the effects of different types of environments

upon the child's pros and waking or weight loss over time so

the real purpose of our study

is to look at how these factors

work together

to launch children on away trajectory that's gonna lead to obesity

or also maintain children on this trajectory

so that's really what we're trying to do in this type of this type of

work

so how are you a sensing and measuring data to determine obesity risks and children

well my study is actually an extension of an ongoing perspective adoption study that was

started in two thousand and two

by researchers here at u w as well as penn state and the university borg

on yale university and university pittsburgh

in this larger study includes five hundred and sixty one children who were adopted within

the first your voice

actually within first month if i should say

and we've been following up these children

since they were about six months of age so this has been a long term

study

and we've been following the children in their families their adoptive families and biological families

through in home visits

through web based questionnaires through telephone interviews

in my study were also using medical records

to assess and the children screen all risks

as well as the growth patterns

well this is fascinating so what to your preliminary findings indicate

is childhood obesity predicted by mix of genetics and environment well before babies board

well what we're finding and these are preliminary data because we're only halfway through data

collection for the broader project about what we're finding so far is that genetic prenatal

as well as close channel factors all influence the child's weight trajectories over time

however the pictures more complicated

then just saying genes environment are important what we're finding so far is that genes

and cranial posed a one fundamental factors influence of children's weight trajectories at different points

in time

in particular base and some preliminary analyses with about two hundred children the sample

we have found that

genetic risk

seems to increase over time

so

genetic risk seems to influence the child's weight waking between you just two and five

but the effect becomes stronger after each five

in contrast what we're finding is that some prenatal factors have an influence upon children's

we came over time but these affect start to wait after each five

and then another factor that we've looked at so far sis phenomena called

really accelerated growth with a small number of children are sample who were born underweight

but then they rapidly put on weight between bertha nine months of age so they

might start at the three th percentile for weight but then jump up to the

sixty eight percent percentile for way so they show catch of growth or accelerated growth

doesn't sound with that would be a bad thing but it turns that when shorter

put on weight that fast within such a short period of time they're putting on

fat nasa not we now

and this is seems to be a respective for later obesity

and what we're finding however is the that again is true we look at the

jewels weight trajectories between ages two and five but after that

the informants things to decrease

so this is only put this altogether so

and based on these preliminary studies a look like it looks like prenatal factors and

maybe very early post channel factors main watch a child

on a weight

trajectory that will lead to being overweight or obese but it may be jeans the

takeover and maintain children on the trajectory

it's interesting so i have to ask the million dollar question

what can we do in the way of intervention and treatment

one popular to three million dollar question

what can we do it well again most my findings are probably aware preliminary based

upon a small subset of children and we haven't had the chance you have to

collect information about the children's diets and do complete the more comprehensive assessments

of the children's genetic risk an impersonal environments

so that's to come

but we hope to do

is to use the information that we do obtain to identify children who showed different

patterns of growth over time it's likely it'll be you know substantial group number of

children who

show healthy weight

between two and ten years of age

and they're fine but we're also anticipating or begin to see this that there are

a number of children who show rapid increases in their weight in their heading towards

obesity and we also see some children who start on this trajectory between the ages

of two and for some children who were starting at age six

so our hope is to look at those children identify the children during each of

these different trajectories in get a better understanding of the degree to which genes the

prenatal environment with post new environment

set children on those trajectories in the degree to which these factors thing to children

on these trajectories

and so the idea here in the one thing that a very interested in also

is looking at how children suppose table environments can exacerbate

or dampen the expression of genetic prenatal risks on these trajectories

so that's

my preliminary answer to the million dollar hush

well thank you so much older

this about a very interesting discussion on a topic that is at the forefront of

our nation's health concerns i wanna thank doctor again a ban for sharing with us

insights today

a very low dimension