How To Define Obesity: The Battle for the B.M.I. and Where to Stop the Murkiness About Weight Loss
At the heart of the debate: The medical community has never provided a precise definition for obesity as a disease. It’s typically understood as an excess of body fat, using body mass index, or B.M.I., to gauge who has too much. The B.M.I., which is a person’s weight divided by the square of their height, cannot tell whether a person is healthy or sick. And there’s no consensus on the signs and symptoms that make obesity an illness the way high blood sugar levels are used to diagnose type 2 diabetes, or chest pain and irregular imaging to tell if someone has heart disease.
Diagnosis by B.M.I. was always imprecise; in an era of remarkably effective weight loss drugs, it’s untenable. It’s estimated that 40 percent of American adults are either overweight or have a B.M.I. How to define Obesity is more than a fight over name, because new treatments that cost upwards of $1,000 per person per month along with supply shortages are making it difficult to define. It is about identifying who is sick and how to allocate resources to best help them get better. It’s about ending the murkiness that has surrounded obesity diagnosis for decades.
Lasker Award for Medical Science: Obesity-drug pioneers win prestigious Lasker award for medical science, winning award of James Chen at the UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas
Some think these drugs might win the top prize in scientific research because of the change in health care. Winning a Lasker often precedes winning a Nobel prize: since 1945, 95 Lasker laureates have also received that top honour. “This raises the spectre that the Nobel committee will take [GLP-1 research] seriously,” Seeley says. The Nobel prizes will be announced next month.
In 2010 the FDA approved the first long-lasting GLP-1-based drugs, for type 2 diabetes, after work resulted in Liraglutide. In the year 2004, liraglutide became the first molecule in the class of drugs to be approved for treating obese people. Today, newer variants, including semaglutide and tirzepatide, sold as Wegovy and Zepbound, are important obesity treatments.
The basic-research category of the LasKER Awards was won by James Chen at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, who discovered how DNA triggered immune and inflammatory responses. In the public-service category, Salim Abdool Karim and Quarraisha Abdool Karim, both at the Centre for AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa, in Durban, were recognized for developing life-saving approaches to prevent and treat HIV infections.
Glucagon is a hormone that increases blood-sugar levels. After cloning the gene for glucagon, he discovered that the gene also encoded a related hormone — later named GLP-1 — that stimulates the pancreas to produce insulin1.
Source: Obesity-drug pioneers win prestigious Lasker Award for medical science
She’s so glad to be remembered, but what can she tell us about her work in GLP-1 research? An essay by Yvyn Mojsov
Mojsov spoke out about the lack of recognition for her contribution to the field a year ago at Rockefeller University. Since then, she has received awards such as the VinFuture Prize. “I’m happy that I’m getting awards, but what makes me even happier is that people are actually reading my work,” she says.
Each prize in a science discipline is limited to no more than three winners, and the challenge will be to select the most deserving recipients. Several other scientists involved in the research behind GLP-1-based drugs have been recognized by awards, including Jens Juul Holst at the University of Denmark and Richard DiMarchi at Indiana University.
Seeley says that 10,000 ants make a difference and they are trying to pick out the three ants that made the most difference. You could put together a dozen names of people who made significant contributions to the field.