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HealthWrap: Obesity, beauty, fertility

By KATE WALKERUPI Correspondent

Following successful trials in rats comes the news that the much-longed-for obesity vaccine may be one step closer to market.

When injected into rats, the vaccine, which is based on affecting the hormone ghrelin -- responsible for controlling appetite and weight gain through the metabolism -- increased the rats' energy levels and enabled them to burn fat and keep their body weight low.

Through metabolic adjustments, the rats were able to eat normally -- albeit healthily -- yet not gain weight or body fat.

The vaccine works by delaying the rate at which ghrelin enters the central nervous system and brain, instead keeping it in the bloodstream and increasing the level of energy expended by the rat.

"The study shows our vaccine slows weight gain and decreases stored fat in rats," said the study's senior author Kim Janda, a professor of chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif.

"Our study is the first published evidence proving that preventing ghrelin from reaching the central nervous system can produce a desired reduction in weight gain."
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The next time you hear a woman complain that there are hundreds of beautiful women for every attractive man, tell her she's right.

A new report from the London School of Economics and published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology has found that attractive parents are more likely to have daughters than sons, as it is genetically advantageous for girls to be good-looking, making them more likely to find a mate.
Boys, on the other hand, can find a mate through cunning and strength.

The researchers analyzed the height, weight and apparent age of first-born young Americans to determine their basic levels of attractiveness as objectively as possible and found that attractive parents were 36 percent more likely to have girls, making women better-looking than men.
Dr Satoshi Kanazawa, evolutionary psychologist and lead researcher, said: "We have shown that beautiful parents have more daughters than ugly parents because physical attractiveness is heritable and because daughters benefit from this more than sons."

The children of aggressive or scientific parents were more likely to be boys, the researchers found, as those characteristics were more likely to make males successful in procreation.
"These may be stereotypes, but they are also fact," Kanazawa said.
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According to new research published in the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, those pregnancies conceived with older fathers are more likely to end in miscarriage, irrespective of the age of the mother.

Dr. Karine Kleinhaus, who led the study while with the Columbia University School of Public Health in New York, and colleagues found that the risk of miscarriage of a fetus conceived by a father over age 40 was 60 percent greater than if the father were 25 to 29, irrespective of other factors that have been linked with increased miscarriage risk in the past. These factors include the mother's age, maternal diabetes, poor maternal health and smoking during pregnancy.
The increased risk of miscarriage does not just apply to fathers in their 40s, however. The miscarriage risk in a pregnancy involving a father aged 35 to 39 was three times higher than the risk if the father were under 25.

The study's authors analyzed data from a large survey of pregnant women undertaken in Jerusalem between 1964 and 1976; 1,500 of those women suffered miscarriages, while 12,000 carried their children to term.

"As child-bearing is increasingly delayed in Western societies, this study provides important information for people who are planning their families," the study's authors write.

While the researchers have established a link between paternal age and miscarriage, they do not know the cause of the link. First-trimester miscarriages are often a result of fetal abnormalities, and as genetic abnormalities in sperm increase with a man's age, it is possible that the link could be attributed thus.

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posted by Cheryl Levesque @ 1:44 PM