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Obesity Risk
Infertility is not just a medical condition but a crisis fuelled by lifestyle choices, with infertility rates soaring particularly in lower-income groups and tier 2 and 3 cities where access to healthcare is limited, a top IVF specialist said. Dr Ajay Murdia, the man behind one of India's largest fertility chain, Indira IVF, said while advancements in assisted reproductive technologies like In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) offer hope, it is a reality that the underprivileged who are hit hard. "Infertility rates are soaring, particularly in lower-income and tier 2 and 3 cities, where access to healthcare, nutrition, and education is limited," Dr Murdia, founder and chairman of Indira IVF, told PTI. "Infertility is no longer just a medical issue; it's a crisis fuelled by lifestyle choices that hit the underprivileged hardest. Without action, even advancements like IVF will remain out of reach for many," he said. Lifestyle factors such as obesity, poor diet, smoking, and chronic stress, .
Obesity can no longer be just defined by body mass index (BMI) and rather should be about how body fat is distributed throughout one's body, researchers said while launching a new framework for diagnosing and managing obesity. Published in the journal Nature Medicine, the framework looks specifically at fat accumulated in the abdomen, measured as 'waist-to-height ratio' -- an increased value of which is related to a higher risk of developing cardiometabolic complications, according to the researchers. An "important novelty" of the framework is including a waist-to-height ratio higher than 0.5, along with a BMI of 25-30, for diagnosing obesity, the authors, representing the European Association for the Study of Obesity (EASO), said. "The choice of introducing waist-to-height ratio, instead of waist circumference, in the diagnostic process is due to its superiority as a cardiometabolic disease risk marker," they wrote. Accumulation of abdominal fat is a more reliable predictor of hea
About 12.5 million children aged between five and 19 in India were overweight in 2022, according to a global analysis published in The Lancet journal Of the 12.5, 7.3 million were boys and 5.2 million girls. The total number of children, adolescents and adults worldwide living with obesity has surpassed one billion. These trends, together with the declining prevalence of people who are underweight since 1990, make obesity the most common form of malnutrition in most countries, the researchers said. Obesity and underweight are both forms of malnutrition and are detrimental to people's health in many ways. The latest study provides a highly detailed picture of global trends in both forms of malnutrition over the last 33 years. The analysis by the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC) -- a global network of scientists -- and the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that among the world's children and adolescents, the rate of obesity in 2022 was four times the rate in 1990. It
Children born to mothers who contract COVID-19 during pregnancy may be more likely to develop obesity, according to a new study. More than 100 million COVID-19 cases have been reported in the United States since 2019, and there is limited information on the long-term health effects of the infection. Pregnant women make up 9 per cent of reproductive-aged women with COVID-19, which exposes millions of babies to maternal infection during foetal development over the next five years. Our findings suggest that children exposed in utero to maternal COVID-19 have an altered growth pattern in early life that may increase their risk of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease over time, said Lindsay T Fourman, MD, of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Mass. There is still a lot of research needed to understand the effects of COVID-19 on pregnant women and their children, she said. The researchers studied 150 infants born to mothers who had COVID-19 during pregnancy and found the