(Press-News.org) Significant weight loss not only improves daily life of morbidly obese woman but also decreases the risk for cardiovascular disease (CVD). However, many people can not lose weight or can not maintain weight loss without help. Bariatric surgery is emerging as a valuable procedure to help morbidly obese individuals lose weight, as studies have shown; it can improve many health profiles and lower mortality. Now, researchers have found another positive impact of significant weight loss after bariatric surgery: it can significantly improve the lipoprotein profiles of women within a year following surgery. This study, conducted by a team of scientists from Tufts University, the University of California-Davis and Oregon Health and Sciences Center, appears in the August Journal of Lipid Research.
Bariatric surgical procedures, such as gastric bypass surgery, have been shown to be an effective intervention to help individuals with morbid obesity lose weight and maintain the loss. Studies on people who have undergone the procedure have found that in addition to facilitating physical weight loss and lowering body fat, bariatric surgery also improves other health parameters, including heart rate, hypertension, and insulin sensitivity, and often result in resolution of type 2 diabetes.
Another area that is correlated with obesity and is a significant heart disease risk is the concentration of lipoproteins –the cholesterol-containing LDL/HDL and related molecules—in the blood.
However, the effect of bariatric surgery on key lipoprotein markers for CVD has not been thoroughly investigated.
So, Bela Asztalos at Tufts' Human Nutrition Research Center and his colleagues analyzed the plasma samples for a number of lipids and lipoproteins and other markers for CVD in 19 obese female volunteers who underwent gastric bypass surgery prior to and after one year following surgery, as well as in samples from19 age-matched lean female control subjects. As expected, the baseline concentrations of triglycerides, glucose and insulin were significantly higher in obese than in normal-weight women, whereas HDL-cholesterol and apolipoprotein A-I levels were significantly lower.
Following an initial reduction of HDL at one month post surgery, most likely resulting from an early marked negative energy balance, plasma lipids and lipoproteins changed beneficially over the course of the year. Eventually they showed significant improvements comparable to individuals taking statin drugs (concentration of total HDL –C increased by nearly 25% while the large, cholesterol-rich α-1 HDL particles, inversely associated with risk for CVD in previous studies, increased by as much as 177% over baseline levels). These increases coincided with reductions in body mass index, body adiposity, plasma triglycerides, and the LDL/HDL ratio. It is worth noting that the improvements of the HDL profile were significantly correlated with the improvements in glucose homeostasis indicating that lipid and glucose metabolisms are closely linked.
The authors note this initial investigation into the effects of weight loss/bariatric surgery on HDL remodeling does have some limitations, including that the observed improvements may not be applicable to men without further studies in male patients. Neither did the study track post-surgery diet, exercise and alcohol intake. However, this study does seem to indicate that beyond the decreases of body weight and fat mass, and the known beneficial effects on insulin sensitivity and glucose metabolism, weight loss/bariatric surgery can improve a number of lipid parameters associated with cardiovascular health and decreased risk for CVD in these weight-reduced patients.
###
From the article: "Effects of weight loss, induced by gastric bypass surgery, on HDL remodeling in obese women" by Bela F. Asztalos, Michael M. Swarbrick, Ernst J. Schaefer, Gerard E. Dallal, Katalin V. Horvath, Masumi Ai, Kimber L. Stanhope, Iselin Austrheim-Smith, Bruce M. Wolfe, Mohamed Ali and Peter J. Havel
Article Link: http://www.jlr.org/content/51/8/2405.full?sid=fa90ef49-1a7b-421c-9364-58ac338f507c
Corresponding Author: Bela Asztalos, Human Nutrition Research Center at Tufts University, Boston, MA; Email: bela.asztalos@tufts.edu
END
NASA's Aqua and TRMM satellites have been watching Karl's clouds and rainfall as he moved across Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula and into the Gulf of Mexico today, powering up into a hurricane.
Infrared imagery of Karl's cloud temperatures from NASA's Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument this morning, Sept. 16 at 0753 UTC (3:53 a.m. EDT) showed strong convective activity in his center as indicated by high thunderstorms that were as cold as -63 Fahrenheit. That strong convection was an indication that the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico were strengthening the storm. ...
CORVALLIS, Ore. – A new study by an Oregon State University business professor has found that developing countries that adopt major international economic treaties do not necessarily gain more foreign direct investment.
In fact, in some cases adopting these treaties can hurt, not help a developing country, contrary to what agencies such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) espouse. The study, published in the current online version of the Journal of World Business, has major implications for Latin American and Caribbean intellectual policy reform
Ted Khoury, an assistant ...
GOES-13 satellite imagery this morning showed the "tropical trio": Tropical Storm Karl over the Gulf of Mexico, Hurricane Igor in the central Atlantic, and a waning Hurricane Julia in the eastern Atlantic Ocean. Hurricane Julia has now lost her Category 4 Hurricane status, and is currently a Category 2 hurricane in the eastern Atlantic and weakening. Wind shear, cooler sea surface temperatures and warmer cloud top temperatures all spell a weaker Julia.
The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite known as GOES-13 that monitors weather over the U.S. East Coast ...
ANN ARBOR, Mich.---As another round of talks continues between Israelis and Palestinians, a new University of Michigan study documents the impact the violence has been inflicting on the region's children.
Palestinian and Israeli children not only suffer the direct physical consequences of violence, they are also being psychologically scarred by the high levels of violence they witness, according to the study, presented earlier this summer at the International Society for Research on Aggression.
Nearly 50 percent of Palestinian children between the ages of 11 and 14 ...
The moon was bombarded by two distinct populations of asteroids or comets in its youth, and its surface is more complex than previously thought, according to new results from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft featured in three papers appearing in the Sept. 17 issue of Science.
In the first paper, lead author James Head of Brown University in Providence, R.I., describes results obtained from a detailed global topographic map of the moon created using LRO's Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA). "Our new LRO LOLA dataset shows that the older highland impactor ...
A multinational team that includes a North Carolina State University researcher has found another piece of the atmospheric puzzle surrounding the effects of aerosol particles on climate change. Their findings will contribute to our ability to more accurately measure human impact on climate, and to determine how much pollution may "mask" the actual rate of climate change.
Dr. Markus Petters, an NC State assistant professor of marine, earth and atmospheric sciences, traveled to the Amazon rainforest in a remote area of Brazil as part of a team that wanted to study how a ...
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — A University of Michigan-led research team has identified a gene responsible in some families for a devastating inherited kidney disorder, thanks to a new, faster method of genetic analysis not available even two years ago. The success offers hope that scientists can speed the painstaking search for the genes responsible for many rare diseases and test drugs to treat them.
The U-M scientists report their success with exome capture, a groundbreaking genetic analysis technique, in the September issue of Nature Genetics.
The U-M- led international ...
A discovery made by Dr. Tarik Möröy, President and Scientific Director and Director of the Hematopoiesis and Cancer research unit at the Institut de recherches cliniques de Montréal (IRCM), and his team was recently published in Blood, the official journal of the American Society of Hematology. The researchers found that a protein can regulate certain characteristics of blood stem cells, which could lead to a better treatment for leukemia patients. Dr. Cyrus Khandanpour, medical doctor and postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Möröy's laboratory, is the study's first author.
The ...
Magnetometers come in many shapes and sizes – an ordinary hand-held compass is the simplest – but alkali-vapor magnetometers are extrasensitive devices that measure magnetic fields using light and atoms. They can detect archaeological remains and mineral deposits underground by their faint magnetic signatures, among a host of other scientific applications.
Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Vavilov State Optical Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, have now made sensitive ...
In the world of Life Coaching there is a popular adage that states "If you do the same things in the same way, you'll get the same results. To expect different results is a sign of madness."
This is what Allan Wilson, owner of Success365, Life Coaching and personal development consultants found himself doing for over a period of almost 30 years.
Wilson who now heads up his own company Success365 which specialises in Life Coaching and Motivational Speaking, spent many years trying his hand at various businesses before realising that he had to change himself first before ...