A Brazilian study, ‘Mice born to females with oocyte-specific deletion of mitofusin 2 have increased weight gain and impaired glucose homeostasis’, published in the journal Molecular Human Reproduction, helps understand why mothers with obesity tend to have children with a propensity to develop metabolic disease during their lifetime, as suggested by previous research.

Growing numbers of people are developing a potentially blinding type of weight-linked headache, idiopathic intracranial hypertension (IIH), that was once considered rare. In the study, IIH rates increased sixfold in Wales between 2003 and 2017 - from 12 per 100,000 people to 76 per 100,000 people. During the same 15-year span, obesity rates in Wales rose from 29% of the population to 40%.

The results from a large-scale observational study carried out at German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke (DIfE) and the German Center for Diabetes Research (Deutsches Zentrum fuer Diabetesforschung, DZD), suggest that obesity and weight gain can lead to vascular disorders, the leading cause of disease and death for people with type 2 diabetes. The findings were reported in the paper, ‘BMI and BMI change following incident type 2 diabetes and risk of microvascular and macrovascular complications: the EPIC-Potsdam study’, published in Diabetologia.

The first ever outcomes from ten years of follow-up from a randomised controlled trial assessing metabolic surgery vs. conventional medical therapy, has concluded that surgery is more effective than conventional medical therapy in the long-term control of T2DM. The findings were reported in the paper, ‘Metabolic surgery versus conventional medical therapy in patients with type 2 diabetes: 10-year follow-up of an open-label, single-centre, randomised controlled trial’, published in The Lancet.

Researchers from the German Center for Diabetes Research (DZD) have highlighted the interconnection of obesity and impaired metabolic health with the severity of COVID-19, they reported their findings in the paper, ‘Global pandemics interconnected—obesity, impaired metabolic health and COVID-19’, published in Nature Reviews Endocrinology.