WASHINGTON – A stress-related hormone may hold the key to the most dangerous type of obesity — the so-called apple-shaped syndrome in which people get fat bellies and often diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease, researchers said. They hope drugs can be designed that can help control the hormone and perhaps stave off the dangerous results of such obesity. „This has the flavor of something that may be a mechanism that contributes importantly to typical obesity,“ said Dr. Jeffrey Flier of Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, who led the study, published in the journal Science. More than 60 percent of Americans are overweight and more than a quarter are obese, meaning they have a high risk of health problems linked to their weight.

Many studies have shown that it is often easy to tell who is most at risk by measuring waist circumference. People with a rare disease called Cushing‘s syndrome have too much abdominal fat as well as diabetes and high blood pressure, but the condition looks a lot like common obesity. This fact caused many scientists and companies to wonder if it is possible that many patients with obesity have a mild form of Cushing‘s syndrome. The answer, however, is no. Cushing‘s is characterized by a high level of the stress hormone cortisol in the blood, and most obese people have normal levels.

Researchers studied the role of stress hormones and enzymes that affect them. One of particular interest was HSD-1. Flier saw work by British researchers that suggested this could happen only in fat cells. Flier created a genetic experiment and took a normal mouse, forced the mouse to have more than normal level of this enzyme activity, but only in its fat cells. He worked with colleagues at the University of Edinburgh. „We got exactly, even more than we bargained for. The mice were fat and on top of that they developed diabetes, they developed high lipids in the blood (high cholesterol). They also developed high blood pressure,“ Flier said.

At the same time, British researchers reported they found the more fat people had in their bodies, the higher the level of the same enzyme, HSD-1, in their fat cells. The enzyme was working only in the fat cells, not in the rest of the body. It was like a localized version of Cushing‘s syndrome. Flier said that he thought the reason for a higher level of HSD-1 could be a combination of genes, diet and exercise.

The immediate thought was that if a drug could stop the effects of the enzyme, people with the apple-shaped obesity problems could be helped. Flier said several pharmaceutical companies are already working on such a drug. Flier said he did not believe HSD-1 would be like another hormone linked with obesity — leptin. Obese rats lost weight when injected with leptin, raising hopes that leptin might be an easy diet pill. But obese humans were found to have above normal leptin levels and giving them additional leptin had little or no effect on their weight.

Reuters