Male Obesity is linked to Brain Inflammation

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Whether we like it or not, everyone accumulates fat.

For women, it usually accumulates around the hips, resulting in a pear-shaped look. In men, fat tends to build up around the abdomen, creating an apple shape.

As it turns out, it's healthier to be a pear than an apple.

A research team at the University of California, Riverside, has found that only male mice experienced neuroinflammation, or activation of the immune system's response in the brain, after being fed a high-fat diet. While females were unaffected, males showed low testosterone and reduced sperm count, in addition to neuroinflammation.

Study results appear in the journal Frontiers in Immunology.

Clinical studies have led researchers to believe females are protected against weight gain when they are young because of ovarian estrogen. The understanding has been that women gain weight after menopause because of a precipitous drop in estrogen, resulting in a decline in health parameters, including obesity.

Aspirin may increase pregnancy chances in women with high inflammation, study finds

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"A daily low dose of aspirin may help a subgroup of women, those who have previously lost a pregnancy, to successfully conceive and carry a pregnancy to term, according to an analysis by researchers at the National Institutes of Health. The women who benefited from the aspirin treatment had high levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), a substance in the blood indicating system-wide inflammation, which aspirin is thought to counteract. The study appears in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism. 

Researchers at NIH's Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) analyzed data originally obtained from the Effects of Aspirin in Gestation and Reproduction (EAGeR) trial. The trial sought to determine if daily low-dose aspirin could prevent subsequent pregnancy loss among women who had one or two prior losses.

For the current study, researchers classified the women into 3 groups: low CRP (below .70 mg per liter of blood), mid CRP (from .70 to 1.95) and high CRP (at or above 1.95). Women within each group received either daily low-dose aspirin or a placebo. In their analysis, researchers found no significant differences in birth rates between those receiving aspirin and those receiving placebo in both the low CRP and mid CRP groups. For the high CRP group, those taking the placebo had the lowest rate of live birth at 44 percent, while those taking daily aspirin had a live-birth rate of 59 percent—a 35-percent increase. Aspirin also appeared to reduce CRP levels in the high CRP group when measured during weeks 8, 20, and 36 of pregnancy.

The authors concluded that more research is needed to confirm the findings and to examine the potential influence of inflammation in becoming pregnant and maintaining pregnancy."

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