This is a very interesting and well-written article. The subject of particular importance to me for a couple reasons.
One is professional. I ran an obesity treatment clinic for several years but it's a clinically important area of practice that fascinated me as far back as undergraduate years. The article correctly states that treatment for obesity is largely unsuccessful, the tools and methods have barely made a dent in terms of solutions.
Surgical procedures for obesity are crude measures to be sure, very frequently associated with severe nutritional deficiencies that are hard to manage. IMO at best surgery is a desperate "last straw" means to stave off fatal outcome, worthy in that sense, but hardly a prescription for the 99% of the population who are not in that condition.
Fact is there's no medical problem more complex than obesity. Hundreds of genetic factors are connected to the many metabolic, endocrine, and immune system alterations from normal found in the obese. There are profound correlations with behavioral disorders and metabolic abnormalities associated with obesity.
An issue in the research that I'll need to learn more about is whether obese patients actually have excess aprosin. The woman who is the subject of the article is deficient, but that doesn't necessarily mean that blocking the hormone will have a favorable effect in obesity. Also, it's apparent the hormone has multiple effects, antagonizing the hormone effect could well cause undesirable outcomes.
I can easily empathize with the woman's plight. While I'm not suffering anything like the devastating condition portrayed, I've always been on the underweight end of the scale. Even as I go forward into my "mature" years, this characteristic hasn't changed. Tall and very thin body build isn't optimal for health and social reasons, then again people say I look good for my age, so it's not the same set of problems as the article describes.
The lesson I take from the article and real-world observations is the incredibly vast range of individual variability among humans, not that we'd have any doubt about it based on even casual observation. But it's a reality we have to constantly remind ourselves about. Our preference of putting things into categories blinds us to the limits of categorizing. Truth is on close examination humans will inevitably fall between the cracks wherever we put the categorical boundaries.
One is professional. I ran an obesity treatment clinic for several years but it's a clinically important area of practice that fascinated me as far back as undergraduate years. The article correctly states that treatment for obesity is largely unsuccessful, the tools and methods have barely made a dent in terms of solutions.
Surgical procedures for obesity are crude measures to be sure, very frequently associated with severe nutritional deficiencies that are hard to manage. IMO at best surgery is a desperate "last straw" means to stave off fatal outcome, worthy in that sense, but hardly a prescription for the 99% of the population who are not in that condition.
Fact is there's no medical problem more complex than obesity. Hundreds of genetic factors are connected to the many metabolic, endocrine, and immune system alterations from normal found in the obese. There are profound correlations with behavioral disorders and metabolic abnormalities associated with obesity.
An issue in the research that I'll need to learn more about is whether obese patients actually have excess aprosin. The woman who is the subject of the article is deficient, but that doesn't necessarily mean that blocking the hormone will have a favorable effect in obesity. Also, it's apparent the hormone has multiple effects, antagonizing the hormone effect could well cause undesirable outcomes.
I can easily empathize with the woman's plight. While I'm not suffering anything like the devastating condition portrayed, I've always been on the underweight end of the scale. Even as I go forward into my "mature" years, this characteristic hasn't changed. Tall and very thin body build isn't optimal for health and social reasons, then again people say I look good for my age, so it's not the same set of problems as the article describes.
The lesson I take from the article and real-world observations is the incredibly vast range of individual variability among humans, not that we'd have any doubt about it based on even casual observation. But it's a reality we have to constantly remind ourselves about. Our preference of putting things into categories blinds us to the limits of categorizing. Truth is on close examination humans will inevitably fall between the cracks wherever we put the categorical boundaries.