JohnnnyOnTheSpot t1_j2f7re8 wrote on December 31, 2022 at 8:47 PM

Really shows how extremely rare genetic contributors of obesity are

wolpertingersunite t1_j2fdmjf wrote on December 31, 2022 at 9:30 PM

I'm not sure about that. I think any particular, well-studied variant is rare. There may be lots and lots of different, poorly understood variants that perhaps act in combination. That kind of thing is hard to parse out.

I mean, based on what we see in the US, you could argue that about 73% of people have genetic predisposition to overweight or obesity in a modern obesogenic environment. We just can't point to specific individual linchpin genes for most of them.

JohnnnyOnTheSpot t1_j2fem72 wrote on December 31, 2022 at 9:37 PM

Lots of gene variant studies don’t actually perform the functional genomics we see in the study here to confirm if they’re pathogenic or not.

Unfortunately with how science is performed, studying variants can take time and they likely only publish data if the functional genomic experiments are fruitful rather than negative or undetermined.

Luckily, new screening methods that can evaluate thousands of variants concurrently are being developed, they just need to be applied to this area of research and we’ll gather so much more data.