Getting the goods on obesity

A study in the World Journal of Surgery finds that obesity and two post-operative complications linked with it, incisional hernia and post-op infection, have associated genetic variants in common.

It’s a longstanding question: does obesity influence these complications or is the real culprit some other problem that commonly co-occurs with obesity, such as diabetes? To the extent that the genetic variants at issue in the study betray no links with other patient conditions, they might be a key piece of evidence.

Jamie Robinson, MD, MS, Joshua Denny, MD, MS, and colleagues gathered BMI and post-op complication data for 736,726 patients, confirming that increases in BMI bear a strong association with both complications.

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