There are, undoubtedly, many factors that go into a person’s weight. A new report from the lab of Sekar Kathiresan, MD, director of the Center for Genomic Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), documents a clear biologic basis for the predisposition of obesity. More specifically, that genetics play a role in how heavy a person gets.
The study used polygenic risk scores (PRS) to stratify patients into risk categories based on their genetic mutations. It is unusual for a disease to be caused by mutations in a single gene. More commonly, diseases (including cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and some brain disorders) are mediated by a collection of common and low-frequency genetic variants, most of which remain unknown. Each variant has a small effect, but, taken together, they could indicate a person’s overall risk.
