Researchers found out why many middle aged women gain weight and the studies have pinned this issue on someone else than their eating habits.
There have been conducted studies on mice and discovered a hormone which rose in levels when the female mice reached menopause. The same hormone might trigger the loss of bone. Trials were conducted on mice and by blocking that hormone; they started having a better physical activity, lost more calories and slowed the bone loss.
This study might mean that the issue of menopause will be solved in the future.
The reproductive hormone (F.S.H. meaning follicle-stimulating hormone) was believed to trigger loss of bone density when a woman reaches menopause. That’s why Dr. Zaidi, a professor who works at the Icahn School of Medicine in New York, created an antibody which preserved bone density. They used it on mice which had their ovaries removed and discovered that the bones from the mice did not fill with fat, as it would normally do when they don’t produce estrogen. They preserved their bone density and even lost a lot of fat.
The study was later replicated by a bone specialist, Dr. Clifford J. Rosen from the Maine Medical Center Research Institute, who doubted the first results. But after two and a half years, the original results were proven to be correct. Dr. Rosen can’t tell yet if the results will be the same in humans but the idea of the research was credible enough.
Other studies concerning obesity and hormonal issues have been conducted on women. Dr.Wendy Kohrt, a medicine professor at the University of Colorado gave healthy women who weren’t at menopause drugs that would create a reversible state of menopause. She observed that the fat around the abdomens would grow by 11% and would burn 50 less calories per day. Then these women stopped using the drugs and started creating estrogen again, the effect reversed.
Experiments conducted on men showed that F.S.H. is the culprit, but there’s also something else which creates weight gain in men who lose testosterone.
The problem of the mice studies is that there have been a lot of them which failed in human studies, but Dr. Zaidi is currently working on an antibody against F.S.H. in people which might work or not on humans.
