Obesity: The Gene – Environment Interaction and its Implications
Organisers: John Speakman
Date: 9th - 12th May 2010
Location: Melville Castle, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
Obesity is widely regarded as being the most serious health threat facing the western world. In the last decade this problem has spread into developing countries and become a true pandemic. Fundamental biological studies have clearly established that there is a strong genetic basis to obesity susceptibility. Yet, it is also clear that there are large environmental effects at play. Obesity is consequently the result of a complex gene by environment interaction. This fact is seldom addressed by research communities who tend to work either on the genetics/physiology or the environment side of the problem.
Moreover, when it comes to treatment options these inevitably focus only on the environmental aspects. This Workshop aimed to bring together the two sides of the obesity research community – those working on the genetics/physiology side and those focusing more on environmental issues, with a view to discussing how research on each side of the divide may facilitate activity on the opposite side to gain new insights into the problem. On the last day of the workshop the delegates addressed the practical consequences of gene-environment nature of obesity and what implications this fact has for how we treat obesity.
Download programme for this Workshop
Published Information from the Workshop
- Meeting report being written by John Speakman was published in Disease Models & Mechanisms, in November 2011.
Organisers & Speakers
John Speakman University of Aberdeen, UK
Clifton Bogardus PECRB, Phoenix, USA
Molly Bray University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA
John De Castro Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, USA
John Clapham AstraZeneca R & D, Cheshire, UK
Deborah Clegg University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center,, Dallas, USA
Abdul Dulloo University of Fribourg, Switzerland
Philippe Froguel University of Lille, France
Laurence Gruer NHS Health Scotland, Edinburgh, UK
Marion Hetherington University of Leeds, UK
Johannes Hebebrand LVR, Köln, Germany
Suzanne Higgs University of Birmingham, UK
Susan Jebb MRC, Human Nutrition Research, Cambridge, UK
David Levitsky Cornell University, New York, USA
Ruth Loos MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, UK
Simon Luckman University of Manchester, UK
Amy Luke Loyola University, Illinois, USA
Vidya Mohamed-Ali University College London, London, UK
Stephen O’Rahilly Institute of Metabolic Science, Cambridge, UK
Mark Pereira University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA
Louis Pérusse Laval University, Québec, Canada
Tom Robinson Stanford University, California, USA
Barbara Rolls Penn State University, Pennsylvania, USA
Michael Symonds University of Nottingham, UK
Margriet Westerterp Maastricht University Medical Centre, The Netherlands
Group Photo
Slideshow
Obesity: The Gene – Environment Interaction and its Implications
9th – 12th May 2010
Melville Castle, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
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