上海研究有助于孩子的遗传性肥胖

A Chinese research team has come up with a way to help people with a rare genetic disorder that gives them an insatiable appetite and leads to obesity. Prader-Willi Syndrome can be fatal, but the researchers say they can help treat the disorder by improving the bacteria in a patient's gastrointestinal tract. ICS reporter Song Wenjing tells us more.

It is unclear how many people in China suffer from Prader-Willi Syndrome, but the disease affects between one in 10,000 to one in 15,000 people worldwide. Helping children with the syndrome control their weight has long been a problem. For now, the major clinical treatment methods include the use of drugs to reduce appetite, gastric by-pass surgery, or a long-term low calorie diet. But none of them is completely effective.

Zhao Liping, Professor from Shanghai Jiaotong University said:"If you reduce the size of their stomach, but their hunger feeling is always there. If you don't control them, they will eat until burst to their stomach. It's really dangerous. You can control their body weight with low calorie diet, but it's very difficult to maintain, because their hunger feeling is always there."

Over the past five years, a team led by researchers from Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Guangdong Province Women and Children Care Hospital have been working with a group of obese children - 17 with genetic disorders and 21 who are simply overweight.

They found that children with the syndrome have the same characteristics of imbalanced intestinal microorganisms as those with simple obesity. That prompted them to use a diet therapy, combining whole grains, traditional Chinese medicinal foods, prebiotics, as well as vegetables, toufu and soy beans.

"This diet contains large amount of non-digestible but fermentable carbohydrates. That means we include in the diet many carbohydrates human cannot digest, but some good bacteria can use them to grow, which can reduce inflammation and reduce hunger feeling. For example, one volunteer lost his weight from 140 kilograms to 72 kilograms," said Zhao.

Zhao's research findings have been published in the July edition of EBioMedicine, a medical journal co-sponsored by Cell and The Lancet. This is the first successful attempt to control weight of genetically obese children. Zhao says the next step is to demonstrate the effectiveness of this dietary approach with researchers from the United States.