Body-mass indexes of British separated twins.
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Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to A Stunkard.
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This article consists of a shortened and annotated translation of a paper on "An Interesting Oral Symptom Complex and Its Relationship to Addiction" by M. Wulff of Berlin, which was delivered before the German Psychoanalytic Society on April 12, 1932. The article describes four cases of an eating disorder in women that was characterized by binge eating, hypersomnolence, apathetic depression, and disparagement of the body image. After the eating binges, all four patients manifested periods of fasting, and two of the three, about whom such information is available, vomited. Translations of large excerpts of the case histories are presented together with a summary of Wulff's discussion.
A subgroup of 351 subjects with human leukocyte antigen (HLA) typing were available from the Framingham Heart Study for analyses to identify associations with obesity. The subjects consisted of 143 males and 208 females aged 58-88 years at the 15th biennial examination in 1978. The obese classification was based on maximum body mass index (BMI) over the 16 available biennial examinations of the Framingham Heart Study. The subjects were classified as obese if they exceeded the 95th percentile of BMI for 20- to 29-year-old subjects as described in the NHANES II study; males were obese if BMI greater than 31.1 and females were obese if BMI greater than 32.3. There were 27 obese males (18.9%) and 44 obese females (21.2%) in the sample. Gene frequencies were compared between the nonobese and obese groups for the pooled sample as well as by sex. Among alleles previously shown to be related to obesity, HLA Bw35 appeared to be more frequent in obese females but these data did not confirm a difference for the B18 or Cw4 alleles. More importantly, HLA Aw30 was found to be significantly higher among the obese subjects in both males and females. Further analyses adjusting for potential confounding variables reduced the estimated relative risk for obesity for subjects with the Bw35 allele to approximately 1.30 and no longer significant for this sample size. In contrast, the relative risk for Aw30, while reduced, remained significant after adjustment for confounding variables. Based on these data, individuals with the Aw30 allele have a relative risk of 2.61 for obesity.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
This report describes the use of the Community Resource Inventory to measure change in community health activities. The inventory consists of a survey of all organizations within a geographical area that might be mobilized for risk factor reduction. The inventory was utilized prior to, and again 3 years after, implementation of a health promotion campaign in a rural county and in a matched reference county. It revealed an increase in health promotion activities in key community institutions in the experimental county during a period when these activities were declining in the reference county. The Community Resource Inventory is a promising method of measuring community change and can be useful in monitoring the progress of programs in which there is a long period of latency between program initiation and measurement of outcomes, such as reduction in cardiovascular mortality.
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Two recent reports have rendered psychiatric research a great service in acknowledging the serious problem under which this research has been laboring and by making recommendations for improved functioning. The President's Biomedical Research Panel is the first high-level government body to take note of what it has felicitously called the "precipitous decline" in research support of the National Institute of Mental Health. Its recommendations of a greatly strengthened research advisory capability of the Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration Institutes effectively complements its recommendations for increased funding of these institutes. The Committee on Biomedical Research in the Veterans Administration, noting the "severely limited" support of research on the VA's massive problem of mental illness, proposed a series of specific recommendations for an improved and expanded research effort.
A review of 13 studies of the direct observation of eating was undertaken in an effort to learn what these studies tell us about the causes and control of obesity. The studies assessed several measures of eating behavior but few of them assessed the same measures. There was no agreement about a distinctive 'obese eating style', but two measures showed promise in discriminating obese from non-obese persons. The first was food choice: obese persons chose more food than non-obese persons (and men chose more than women and tall persons more than short ones). The second measure was rate of eating: obese persons consumed more food per minute than non-obese persons. The studies point up the remarkable plasticity of human eating behavior and the wide range of factors which influence it. This plasticity has profound implications for both research and therapy. It means that only unusual care in the identification and control of extraneous variables will permit adequate assessment of the variables under investigation. Its second implication is as important: if eating is so dependent upon environment, it may be easier to modify than previously thought.
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The possibility that patients may retrospectively exaggerate the severity of complaints that they have experienced has not been systematically investigated. The validity of retrospective reports was called into question by a study of vomiting following gastric bypass surgery for obesity. Such vomiting occurred relatively infrequently--no more than 3.4 times per week, even during the first postoperative month. At a 6-month follow-up, however, some patients reported that they had experienced very high rates of vomiting postoperatively, in direct contradiction to their earlier reports. Such retrospective exaggeration has apparently contributed to the widespread belief that vomiting following gastric bypass surgery is a serious problem. We believe that this report is the first to describe retrospective exaggeration of symptoms. Further research is needed to assess the extent of this problem.