Microevolutionary hypothesis of the obesity epidemic.

Autor: Fraiman J; Department of Graduate Education, Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine, Scranton, PA, United States of America., Baver S; Hanmol LLC, Sudbury, MA, United States of America., Henneberg M; Biological Anthropology and Comparative Anatomy Unit, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia.; The Institute of Evolutionary Medicine, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.; The Unit for Biocultural Variation in Obesity, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: PloS one [PLoS One] 2024 Aug 07; Vol. 19 (8), pp. e0305255. Date of Electronic Publication: 2024 Aug 07 (Print Publication: 2024).
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0305255
Abstrakt: The obesity epidemic represents potentially the largest phenotypic change in Homo sapiens since the origin of the species. Despite obesity's high heritability, it is generally presumed a change in the gene pool could not have caused the obesity epidemic. Here we advance the hypothesis that a rapid change in the obesogenic gene pool has occurred second to the introduction of modern obstetrics dramatically altering evolutionary pressures on obesity-the microevolutionary hypothesis of the obesity epidemic. Obesity is known to increase childbirth-related mortality several fold. Prior to modern obstetrics, childbirth-related mortality occurred in over 10% of women in their lifetime. After modern obstetrics, this mortality reduced to a fraction of a percent, thereby lifting a strong negative selection pressure. Regression analysis of data for ~ 190 countries was carried out to examine associations between 1990 lifetime maternal death rates (LMDR) and current obesity rates. Multivariate regression showed LMDR correlated more strongly with national obesity rates than GDP, calorie intake and physical inactivity. Analyses controlling for confounders via partial correlation show that LMDR explains approximately 11% of the variability of obesity rate between nations. For nations with LMDR above the median (>0.45%), LMDR explains 33% of obesity variance, while calorie intake, GDP and physical inactivity show no association with obesity in these nations. The microevolutionary hypothesis offers a parsimonious explanation of the global nature of the obesity epidemic.
Competing Interests: No authors have competing interests.
(Copyright: © 2024 Fraiman et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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