Parents have gastric bypass; children’s DNA may receive the benefits

Utah.gov

Gastric bypass surgeries would, at first glance, seem to tackle the problems of obesity through simple physics: with a smaller stomach, there's only so much food a person can ingest. Actual results are anything but simple, however. Long before any significant weight loss occurs, patients who have the surgery show a remarkable reversal in many aspects of type-2 diabetes and cardiovascular risk factors. This suggests the body responds physiologically to the altered food intake itself rather than its impact on obesity.

New research shows that the effects may go beyond the patients themselves. A study has been tracking women who have had kids both before and after these surgeries, and it reveals that the children also see changes in how their bodies handle fats and sugars (as well as in markers of cardiovascular health). The researchers have found that the offspring may be benefiting from epigenetic inheritance, in which the parent's surgery influences how the DNA they inherit is interpreted by their cells.

Epigenetics and hunger

Epigenetics has become a rather confusing topic, in part because it has become an umbrella term that covers two very different phenomena. In general, epigenetics describes traits that are maintained without any changes in the underlying DNA sequence. The phenomenon can both occur over the course of a single individual's lifetime and, in rare cases, it can span generations.