The researchers from UT Southwestern Medical Center have found a new cause for obesity. According to their report published in the September issue of Cell Metabolism, a gene might be responsible for obesity.

“From worms to mammals, this gene controls fat formation,” said Dr. Jonathan Graff, associate professor of developmental biology and internal medicine at UT Southwestern and senior author of the study. “It could explain why so many people struggle to lose weight and suggests an entirely new direction for developing medical treatments that address the current epidemic of diabetes and obesity.”

“People who want to fit in their jeans might someday be able to overcome their genes.” He added.

In fact the gene was discovered more than 50 years ago by Winifred Doane, now a professor emeritus at Arizona State University, while she was studying fruit flies and noticed that some contained more fat than others.

She linked this trait to a gene she named adipose and hypothesized that this natural variation gave the chubbier flies an evolutionary advantage

But now the researchers discovered that animals without a working copy of adipose (Adp), become obese and resistant to insulin, while those with increased Adp activity in fat tissue become slimmer, the researchers found.

Graff’s team had studied the effects of Adp in worms. According to their findings, the worms lacking Adp activity became fat, although they appeared to be otherwise healthy and fertile.

To explore Adp’s function even further, Graff and his colleagues produced a strain of mutant flies like those that Doane had found years earlier. They found that the mutant flies were indeed fat and also had trouble getting around. Flies with only one copy of the Adp mutation fell somewhere in between the fat and normal flies, evidence that the gene’s effects are “dose dependent,” they reported.

“Maybe if you could affect this gene, even just a little bit, you might have a beneficial effect on fat,” said Jonathan Graff of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, noting that people often become overweight very gradually—adding just one or two pounds a year. “After 30 years, that’s a lot.”

But it’s still to be determined if the gene works similarly in humans. Only then the findings could lead to a new weapon against obesity.

In late August, another research concluded that the obesity may be the result of an infection with a common virus.

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.

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.