Huh. This might be important.
From Good News Network, April 25:
It has long been known that obesity is an inflammatory disease, i.e. a chronic defensive reaction of the body to stress caused by excess nutrients.
Based on this knowledge, a group of researchers led by Nabil Djouder, Head of the Growth Factors, Nutrients and Cancer Group at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), decided to try to fight obesity by preventing inflammation—and they succeeded.
Their paper, published this month in Nature Metabolism, shows that digoxin, a drug already in use against heart diseases, reduces inflammation and leads to a 40% weight loss in obese mice, without any side effects.
Digoxin reverses obesity completely, according to CNIO. Treated mice became the same weight as healthy, non-obese animals. The mice were also cured of metabolic disorders associated to obesity.
Digoxin reduces the production of a molecule called interleukin 17A, (IL-17A) which generally triggers inflammation. The study identifies it as a causal factor of obesity: “When you inhibit the production of IL-17A or the signaling pathway that this molecule activates, you don’t have obesity,” says Djouder.
The Madrid researchers found that IL-17A acts directly on adipose tissue to cause obesity and severe metabolic alterations associated with body weight gain, the so-called metabolic syndrome, which includes type 2 diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular diseases....
....MUCH MORE
If interested here is the paper at Nature Metabolism
Here is the CNIO mini-bio on Nabil Djouder, he is going after some of the biggies in chronic disease:
Medical Xpress - "Research team describes how a virus can cause diabetes"
It is big money and ameliorating a lot of human suffering if all the metabolic stuff can be figured-out. As noted early-on in the Covid-19 pandemic:
"Coronavirus pandemic spurs a chocolate and frozen pizza sales boom in America: Nestle USA CEO"
That's it, time to dust off the diabetes/retinopathy/dialysis/prosthetics portfolio....
*****
Around ten years ago a sharp young analyst gave me his five-minute kidneys and dialysis pitch. It made quite an impression on me, I remember it to this day. Unfortunately for him and his firm we were just coming off the Dotbomb crash and everything looked really cheap so I filed the idea under "stuff I'll get to".CDC Report: 100 Million Americans Either Diabetic or On Their Way
Davita is up seven-fold since that day, $103.44 at the close. Fresenius, the largest in the industry is up ten-bagger in ten years, no lost decade there..
There's an opportunity in here, somewhere. The direct costs of healthcare for diabetics has to be five grand a year per. That gives us a half-trillion dollar market to address. Plus, who really wants a countryside full of blind amputees on dialysis?
Some concepts, profound in their simplicity, that policymakers will have to internalize before the human toll of current economics—whether fast suicides by firearms or hanging or slow suicides by opioids, self-medicating with carbohydrates and booze leading to epidemic levels of obesity, cirrhosis and diabetes, from first generation poverty leading to multi-generational epigenetic DNA methylation of genes linked to depression—the policy wonks have to get the basics down first.
Drink more sugar!
