Is Weight Loss at the Heart of Health?

A three-year, $2.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health will enable researchers from Baylor College of Medicine and collaborating institutions to identify chemicals in the blood called markers that indicate a risk of heart disease and heart attack and determine how those markers are affected by changes in weight and lifestyle.

The study is part of the Look AHEAD (Action for Health in Diabetes) study.”What we are finding is that cardiovascular events as well as diabetes are caused by inflammation of the adipose (or fat) tissue,” said Dr. Christie Ballantyne, professor of medicine at BCM and an expert in the field of biomarkers for disease. Markers of inflammation could play a role in defining and quantifying heart disease risk, he said.The Look AHEAD study, led by BCM researcher Dr. John Foreyt, will follow 5,000 people who are overweight and have diabetes – both conditions that lead to inflammation of fatty tissue. Each person will be educated in how to change his or her habits, adding diet or exercise to their daily routine.”We are looking at how each intervention works for each person, how diet or exercise affect the fat tissue,” Ballantyne said. “That will then show us how these interventions affect the heart.”Previous studies showed that as people lost weight and maintained the loss, there was a decrease in inflammation.”These findings will lead to better ways of treating people at risk of heart attacks and other cardiovascular events.” Ballantyne said.Funding for this study was provided by a grant from the National Institutes of Health. Researchers from the University of Vermont Medical College, Wake Forest University Health Sciences in Winston-Salem, N.C., The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and St. Luke’s Roosevelt Institute for Health Sciences in New York are also contributing to this study.(Source: Baylor College of Medicine : May 2007)