Researchers have developed a new, lean mouse with characteristics suggesting that someday, using medication to manipulate a specific protein in humans could emerge as a strategy to treat obesity and disorders associated with excess weight, such as diabetes and metabolic syndrome.

Published in the March/April issue of AJLM, the article, written by Peter M. Janiszewski, MSc, Travis J. Saunders BSc, and Robert Ross, PhD, at Queen’s University, reviews existing evidence that exercise and caloric restriction can be a valid treatment strategy for metabolic syndrome.

Diuretics were associated with reduced heart disease in a drug comparison trial involving 23,077 people with both high blood pressure and the metabolic syndrome, a cluster of risk factors for heart disease, report researchers from The University of Texas School of Public Health and Case Western Reserve University in the Jan. 28 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

About nine percent of teenagers may have metabolic syndrome, a clustering of risk factors that put them on the path toward heart disease and diabetes in adulthood.

Otherwise-healthy adults who eat two or more servings of meat a day — the equivalent of two burger patties — increase their risk of developing metabolic syndrome by 25 percent compared with those who eat meat twice a week, according to research published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.

Metabolic syndrome, a collection of related abnormalities like hypertension, obesity, insulin resistance, and excess cholesterol, poses a major risk for developing heart disease and diabetes.

Metabolic syndrome in children represents a potentially serious threat to health in adulthood, yet many parents and caregivers do not have a clear idea of what metabolic syndrome is and why it is dangerous.

Research from Duke University Medical Center shows that even a modest amount of brisk walking weekly is enough to trim waistlines and cut the risk of metabolic syndrome (MetS), an increasingly frequent condition linked to obesity and a sedentary lifestyle.

A recently published research article in the “Journal of Proteome Research”, authored by researchers from the Nestlé Reserarch Center, Genomatix Software GmbH, Rosetta Inpharmatics LLC, CXR Biosciences Ltd, the Cancer Research UK Molecular Pharmacology Unit demonstrates the synergisms and enhanced analytic power of the combination of thorough metabolic profiling with the unique and proprietary microarray analysis methods of Genomatix Software GmbH.

Abdominal fat, the spare tire that many of us carry, has long been implicated as a primary suspect in causing the metabolic syndrome, a cluster of conditions that includes the most dangerous heart attack risk factors: prediabetes, diabetes, high blood pressure, and changes in cholesterol.

Obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and inactivity: they're not just your father's problems any more, University of New Hampshire research finds. New data on the widely unstudied demographic of college students indicates that this group of 18 - 24-year-olds are on the path toward chronic health diseases. Although limited, national data suggest the trend is not unique to UNH.

Typified by high blood pressure, weight gain around the waist and problems regulating blood sugar, metabolic syndrome may also be associated with compromised heart structure and function, according to a paper published in the online open access journal BMC Cardiovascular Disorders.