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What is Morbid Obesity?
Medically, the word "morbid" means causing disease or injury. Morbid obesity is a serious disease process in which the accumulation of fatty tissue on the body becomes excessive and interferes with or injures the other bodily organs. This may result in serious or life-threatening health problems, which are called co-morbidities.
Morbid obesity is also referred to as "Clinically Severe Obesity", and is recognized by the consensus of medical opinion as a very serious health problem, a disease process. In most cases, the underlying cause is genetics -- you inherit the tendency to gain weight, and once the problem is established, there is very little that will power can do about it -- any more than a diabetic patient might control his blood sugar by will power.
How do we know it's genetic?
Numerous scientific studies have established that there is a very powerful genetic predisposition to morbid obesity:
- Children adopted at birth show no correlation of their body weight with that of their adoptive parents; those responsible for feeding them and teaching them how to eat. They show an 80% correlation of their body weight with their genetic parents, whom they have never met.
- Identical twins, with the same genes, show a much higher similarity of body weights than do fraternal twins, who have different genes.
- Certain genetic populations, such as the American Indians of the Southwest, have a very high incidence of severe obesity. They also have a markedly increased incidence of diabetes and heart disease.
- Mice can be bred to be very obese. This is the result of a defect in a single gene, called the ob gene, which is associated with the ability to make the hormone leptin. The problem in humans is much more complicated genetically with over 100 genes involved in some aspect of obesity.
- Another hormone, called ghrelin, has recently been discovered and found to stimulate the appetite in normal people. People who lose weight by dieting have persistently elevated ghrelin levels, urging them to eat more. People who undergo a gastric bypass have a decrease in ghrelin levels by about 77%, indicating one mechanism of how the operation reduces appetite.
How do you know if you are Morbidly Obese?
We use three criteria:
- Are you more than 100 lbs. over your "ideal body weight?� This is a weight established by the weight at which you are likely to live the longest, not what you wish you could weigh - which is usually less.
- Another alternative criterion is called the Body Mass Index (BMI). If this is greater than 40, surgery should be considered. If it is greater than 35, and is accompanied by serious co-morbidities, surgery may be indicated. To find out your BMI, click on the BMI calculator link.
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