According to a new research an infection with a common virus may be a contributing factor be a contributing factor to the obesity epidemic sweeping through the United States and other countries.

The study led by Nikhil Dhurandhar, Ph.D., now an associate professor at Pennington Biomedical Research Center, demonstrated in the laboratory experiments that infection with human adenovirus-36 (Ad-36), long recognized as a cause of respiratory and eye infections in humans, transforms adult stem cells obtained from fat tissue into fat cells.

If further research will confirm the results of this study it is very likely that soon we will have a vaccine or antiviral medication to help fight viral obesity in the future.

“We’re not saying that a virus is the only cause of obesity, but this study provides stronger evidence that some obesity cases may involve viral infections,” says study presenter Magdalena Pasarica, M.D., Ph.D., of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, a campus of the Louisiana State University system.

“Not all infected people will develop obesity,” she notes. “We would ultimately like to identify the underlying factors that predispose some obese people to develop this virus and eventually find a way to treat it.”

The study was presented at the 234th national meeting of the American Chemical Society.

Though the exact mechanism by which the virus might cause obesity in people is currently unknown, notes Pasarica, but the researchers do not rule out the possibility that other human viruses may also contribute to obesity.

In order to prove their results, the group also conducted a noted epidemiologic study - the first to associate a virus with human obesity - showing 30 percent of obese people were infected with the Ad-36 virus in comparison to 11 percent of lean individuals. But not all the people infected with the virus will develop obesity

"We would ultimately like to identify the underlying factors that predispose some obese people to develop this virus and eventually find a way to treat it." said Pasarica.

Obesity is an increasingly alarming health condition worldwide and a study published in July added to the alarm: by 2015, 75 percent of American adults will be overweight, 41 percent obese, it says.

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Center for Human Nutrition have done a study that said that the percentage of American adults who were obese more than doubled in 40 years, from 13 percent in the ‘60s to 32 percent in 2004. The researchers said the percentage of overweight and obese Americans has increased average rate of 0.3 to 0.8 percentage points a year.

Particularly at risk are women ages 20 to 34, regardless of race and ethnicity, who seem to be becoming obese and overweight at a significantly faster rate than men and children.