Abstract
Obesity is a major health issue that has reached pandemic status with no clear solutions. Much has been learned over the past 50 years about the regulation of body fat. Examples include the discovery of the hormone leptin, finding thermogenic brown adipose tissue in adult humans, elucidating pathways in the brain that affect hunger and feeding behavior, quantifying adipocyte turnover and the lipids therein, identifying single genes that produce rare but severe obesity, and finding thousands of genetic variants associated with individual differences in body mass index (BMI). Despite this progress, there remain several key questions to be answered to aid the prevention and treatment of obesity.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 944-946 |
Number of pages | 3 |
Journal | Science (New York, N.Y.) |
Volume | 381 |
Issue number | 6661 |
Early online date | 31 Aug 2023 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Sept 2023 |
Bibliographical note
AcknowledgmentsThe authors thank the Royal Society for supporting the scientific meeting in October 2022 about Causes of obesity: Theories, conjectures and evidence, which was the inspiration for this Perspective.