Obesity is defined as the excessive accumulation or abnormal distribution of body fat. According to data from World Obesity Atlas 2024, the increase in prevalence of obesity has become a major worldwide health problem in adults as well as among children and adolescents. Although an increasing number of drugs have been approved for the treatment of obesity in recent years, many of these drugs have inevitable side effects which have increased the demand for new safe, accessible and effective drugs for obesity and prompt interest in natural products. Berberine (BBR) and its metabolites, known for their multiple pharmacological effects. Recent studies have emphatically highlighted the anti-obesity benefits of BBR and the underlying mechanisms have been gradually elucidated. However, its clinical application is limited by poor oral absorption and low bioavailability. Based on this, this review summarizes current research on the anti-obesity effects of BBR and its metabolites, including advancements in clinical trail results, understanding potential molecular mechanisms and absorption and bioavailability. As a natural compound derived from plants, BBR holds potential as an alternative ap
Despite obesity being widely discussed in the social sciences, the effect of a robot's perceived obesity level on trust is not covered by the field of HRI. While in research regarding humans, Body Mass Index (BMI) is commonly used as an indicator of obesity, this scale is completely irrelevant in the context of robots, so it is challenging to operationalize the perceived obesity level of robots; indeed, while the effect of robot's size (or height) on people's trust in it was addressed in previous HRI papers, the perceived obesity level factor has not been addressed. This work examines to what extent the perceived obesity level of humanoid robots affects people's trust in them. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a within-subjects study where, using an online pre-validated questionnaire, the subjects were asked questions while being presented with two pictures of humanoids, one with a regular obesity level and the other with a high obesity level. The results show that humanoid robots with lower perceived obesity levels are significantly more likely to be trusted.
Background: Childhood and adolescent overweight and obesity remain major public health concerns in the United States and are shaped by behavioral, household, and community factors. Their joint predictive structure at the population level remains incompletely characterized. Objectives: The study aims to identify multilevel predictors of overweight and obesity among U.S. adolescents and compare the predictive performance, calibration, and subgroup equity of statistical, machine-learning, and deep-learning models. Data and Methods: We analyze 18,792 children aged 10-17 years from the 2021 National Survey of Children's Health. Overweight/obesity is defined using BMI categories. Predictors included diet, physical activity, sleep, parental stress, socioeconomic conditions, adverse experiences, and neighborhood characteristics. Models include logistic regression, random forest, gradient boosting, XGBoost, LightGBM, multilayer perceptron, and TabNet. Performance is evaluated using AUC, accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, and Brier score. Results: Discrimination range from 0.66 to 0.79. Logistic regression, gradient boosting, and MLP showed the most stable balance of discrimination and c
Obesity prevalence in Indonesian adults increased from 10.5% in 2007 to 23.4% in 2023. Studies showed that genetic predisposition significantly influences obesity susceptibility. To aid this, polygenic risk scores (PRS) help aggregate the effects of numerous genetic variants to assess genetic risk. However, 91% of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) involve European populations, limiting their applicability to Indonesians due to genetic diversity. This study aims to develop and validate an ancestry adjusted PRS for obesity in the Indonesian population using principal component analysis (PCA) method constructed from the 1000 Genomes Project data and our own genomic data from approximately 2,800 Indonesians. We calculate PRS for obesity using all races, then determine the first four principal components using ancestry-informative SNPs and develop a linear regression model to predict PRS based on these principal components. The raw PRS is adjusted by subtracting the predicted score to obtain an ancestry adjusted PRS for the Indonesian population. Our results indicate that the ancestry-adjusted PRS improves obesity risk prediction. Compared to the unadjusted PRS, the adjusted score
Metabolic diseases such as type 2 diabetes and obesity represent a rapidly escalating global health burden, yet current therapeutic strategies largely target isolated symptoms or single molecular pathways. To this end, we developed an integrated computational pipeline leveraging knowledge graph, pathway analysis and network pharmacology to elucidate the multi-target mechanisms of Ayurvedic Single Herbal Drugs (SHDs). SHDs associated with diabetes and obesity were curated from the Ayurvedic Pharmacopoeia of India, followed by phytochemical identification using IMPPAT database, yielding a shortlist of 11 SHDs and their 188 phytochemicals after drug-likeness and bioavailability filtering. Subsequently, molecular targets of the phytochemicals in SHDs, disease-associated genes and therapeutic targets of FDA-approved drugs, were curated via integration of data from several databases. Pathway enrichment analysis revealed significant functional overlap between SHD-associated and disease-associated pathways. All curated data were embedded into a Neo4j-based knowledge graph, enabling SHD-disease intersection analysis that prioritized key disease-relevant targets, including PTPN1, GLP1R, and
In this paper we investigate the spatio-temporal dynamics of obesity rates across Italian regions from 2010 to 2022, aiming to identify spatial and temporal trends and assess potential heterogeneities. We implement a Bayesian hierarchical Beta regression model to analyze regional obesity rates, integrating spatial and temporal random effects, alongside gender and various exogenous predictors. The model leverages the Stochastic Search Variable Selection technique to identify significant predictors supported by the data. The analysis reveals both regional heterogeneity and dependence in obesity rates over the study period, emphasizing the importance of considering gender and spatial correlation in explaining its dynamics over time. In fact, the inclusion of structured spatial and temporal random effects captures the complexities of regional variations over time. These random effects, along with gender, emerge as the primary determinants of obesity prevalence across Italian regions, while the role of exogenous covariates is found to be minimal at the regional level. While socioeconomic and lifestyle factors remain fundamental at a micro-level, the findings demonstrate that the integra
Luminal breast cancers represent the most prevalent molecular subtype of breast carcinoma, with Luminal A tumors generally associated with more favorable clinical outcomes than Luminal B tumors. Obesity-related inflammation and prolonged exposure to exogenous steroids have been implicated in the progression of luminal malignancies. This study evaluated 1,928 patients with Luminal A breast cancer and 1,610 patients with Luminal B breast cancer to examine associations among body mass index (BMI), age, ethnic background, menopausal status, and receptor expression, including estrogen receptor (ER), progesterone receptor (PR), and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2). Patients with Luminal B tumors demonstrated a significantly greater mean BMI compared with those with Luminal A tumors. In addition, Luminal B tumors were more frequently observed among patients of African ancestry relative to White and Hispanic populations. Multivariable analyses revealed that elevated BMI and African ancestry were independently associated with increased odds of Luminal B carcinoma, whereas postmenopausal status was associated with lower risk. Mediation analysis further indicated that BMI parti
Chronic obesity management requires continuous monitoring of energy balance behaviors, yet traditional self-reported methods suffer from significant underreporting and recall bias, and difficulty in integration with modern digital health systems. This study presents COBRA (Chronic Obesity Behavioral Recognition Architecture), a novel deep learning framework for objective behavioral monitoring using wrist-worn multimodal sensors. COBRA integrates a hybrid D-Net architecture combining U-Net spatial modeling, multi-head self-attention mechanisms, and BiLSTM temporal processing to classify daily activities into four obesity-relevant categories: Food Intake, Physical Activity, Sedentary Behavior, and Daily Living. Validated on the WISDM-Smart dataset with 51 subjects performing 18 activities, COBRA's optimal preprocessing strategy combines spectral-temporal feature extraction, achieving high performance across multiple architectures. D-Net demonstrates 96.86% overall accuracy with category-specific F1-scores of 98.55% (Physical Activity), 95.53% (Food Intake), 94.63% (Sedentary Behavior), and 98.68% (Daily Living), outperforming state-of-the-art baselines by 1.18% in accuracy. The frame
Childhood and adolescent obesity rates are a global concern because obesity is associated with chronic diseases and long-term health risks. Artificial intelligence technology has emerged as a promising solution to accurately predict obesity rates and provide personalized feedback to adolescents. This study emphasizes the importance of early identification and prevention of obesity-related health issues. Factors such as height, weight, waist circumference, calorie intake, physical activity levels, and other relevant health information need to be considered for developing robust algorithms for obesity rate prediction and delivering personalized feedback. Hence, by collecting health datasets from 321 adolescents, we proposed an adolescent obesity prediction system that provides personalized predictions and assists individuals in making informed health decisions. Our proposed deep learning framework, DeepHealthNet, effectively trains the model using data augmentation techniques, even when daily health data are limited, resulting in improved prediction accuracy (acc: 0.8842). Additionally, the study revealed variations in the prediction of the obesity rate between boys (acc: 0.9320) and
Novel brain biomarkers of obesity were sought by studying statistical measurements on fractional anisotropy (FA) images of different white matter (WM) tracts from subjects with specific demographic characteristics. Tract measurements were chosen that showed differences between two groups (normal weigh and overweight/obese) and that were correlated with their BMI. From these measurements, a simple and novel process was applied to select those that would allow the creation of models to quantify and classify the state of obesity of individuals. The biomarkers were created from the tract measurements used in the models. Some positive correlations were found between WM integrity and BMI, mainly in tracts involved in motor functions. From this result, neuroplasticity in motor tracts associated with obesity was hypothesized. Two models were built to quantify and classify obesity status, whose regression coefficients formed the novel proposed obesity-associated brain biomarkers. A process for the selection of tract measurements was proposed, such that models were built to determine the obesity status of subjects individually. From these models, novel brain biomarkers associated with obesit
Reliable prediction of pediatric obesity can offer a valuable resource to providers, helping them engage in timely preventive interventions before the disease is established. Many efforts have been made to develop ML-based predictive models of obesity, and some studies have reported high predictive performances. However, no commonly used clinical decision support tool based on existing ML models currently exists. This study presents a novel end-to-end pipeline specifically designed for pediatric obesity prediction, which supports the entire process of data extraction, inference, and communication via an API or a user interface. While focusing only on routinely recorded data in pediatric electronic health records (EHRs), our pipeline uses a diverse expert-curated list of medical concepts to predict the 1-3 years risk of developing obesity. Furthermore, by using the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard in our design procedure, we specifically target facilitating low-effort integration of our pipeline with different EHR systems. In our experiments, we report the effectiveness of the predictive model as well as its alignment with the feedback from various stakehol
Obesity is widely recognized as a serious and pervasive health concern. We study obesity through body mass index (BMI), which is known to be highly heritable, and identify important genetic risk factors for BMI from hundreds of thousands of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the Framingham Study data. Several challenges arise when using traditional genome-wide association studies (GWAS): (1) They suffer from a low power due to a combination of a limited number of participants and the stringent genome-wide significance threshold; (2) existing prior knowledge from large meta-analyses may provide valuable guidance but is often underutilized; (3) the one-at-a-time univariate marginal regression framework ignores the joint and conditional nature of genetic effects; (4) GWAS focus solely on mean outcomes, whereas obesity inherently concerns abnormally high BMI levels. To address these challenges, we conduct the analysis by proposing and applying a novel Knowledge Integration Quantile Regression (KIQR) approach via simultaneous variable selection and estimation, focusing on the conditional high quantiles of BMI, which are most relevant to obesity risk, while integrating prior infor
Childhood obesity remains a major public health challenge in the United States, strongly influenced by a combination of individual-level, household-level, and environmental-level risk factors. Traditional epidemiological studies typically analyze these levels independently, limiting insights into how structural environmental conditions interact with individual-level characteristics to influence health outcomes. In this study, we introduce a micro-macro machine learning framework that integrates (1) individual-level anthropometric and socioeconomic data from NHANES and (2) macro-level structural environment features, including food access, air quality, and socioeconomic vulnerability extracted from USDA and EPA datasets. Four machine learning models Logistic Regression, Random Forest, XGBoost, and LightGBM were trained to predict obesity using NHANES microdata. XGBoost achieved the strongest performance. A composite environmental vulnerability index (EnvScore) was constructed using normalized indicators from USDA and EPA at the state level. Multi-level comparison revealed strong geographic similarity between states with high environmental burden and the nationally predicted micro-le
Obesity is a critical global health issue driven by dietary, physiological, and environmental factors, and is strongly associated with chronic diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disorders, and cancer. Machine learning has emerged as a promising approach for early obesity risk prediction, yet a comparative evaluation of ensemble techniques -- particularly hybrid majority voting and ensemble stacking -- remains limited. This study aims to compare hybrid majority voting and ensemble stacking methods for obesity risk prediction, identifying which approach delivers higher accuracy and efficiency. The analysis seeks to highlight the complementary strengths of these ensemble techniques in guiding better predictive model selection for healthcare applications. Two datasets were utilized to evaluate three ensemble models: Majority Hard Voting, Weighted Hard Voting, and Stacking (with a Multi-Layer Perceptron as meta-classifier). A pool of nine Machine Learning (ML) algorithms, evaluated across a total of 50 hyperparameter configurations, was analyzed to identify the top three models to serve as base learners for the ensemble methods. Preprocessing steps involved dataset balancing, and
Obesity is a global epidemic causing at least 2.8 million deaths per year. This complex disease is associated with significant socioeconomic burden, reduced work productivity, unemployment, and other social determinants of Health (SDoH) disparities. Objective: The objective of this study was to investigate the effects of SDoH on obesity prevalence among adults in Shelby County, Tennessee, USA using a geospatial machine-learning approach. Obesity prevalence was obtained from publicly available CDC 500 cities database while SDoH indicators were extracted from the U.S. Census and USDA. We examined the geographic distributions of obesity prevalence patterns using Getis-Ord Gi* statistics and calibrated multiple models to study the association between SDoH and adult obesity. Also, unsupervised machine learning was used to conduct grouping analysis to investigate the distribution of obesity prevalence and associated SDoH indicators. Results depicted a high percentage of neighborhoods experiencing high adult obesity prevalence within Shelby County. In the census tract, median household income, as well as the percentage of individuals who were black, home renters, living below the poverty
Purpose: We developed an artificial neural network (ANN) combining radiomics with clinical and dosimetric features to predict the extent of body mass index (BMI) increase after surgery and proton therapy, with advantage of improved accuracy and integrated key feature selection. Methods and Materials: Uniform treatment protocol composing of limited surgery and proton radiotherapy was given to 84 pediatric craniopharyngioma patients (aged 1-20 years). Post-treatment obesity was classified into 3 groups (<10%, 10-20%, and >20%) based on the normalized BMI increase during a 5-year follow-up. We developed a densely connected 4-layer ANN with radiomics calculated from pre-surgery MRI (T1w, T2w, and FLAIR), combining clinical and dosimetric features as input. Accuracy, area under operative curve (AUC), and confusion matrices were compared with random forest (RF) models in a 5-fold cross-validation. The Group lasso regularization optimized a sparse connection to input neurons to identify key features from high-dimensional input. Results: Classification accuracy of the ANN reached above 0.9 for T1w, T2w, and FLAIR MRI. Confusion matrices showed high true positive rates of above 0.9 wh
More than one-third of the adult population in the United States is obese. Obesity has been linked to factors such as, genetics, diet, physical activity and the environment. However, evidence indicating associations between the built environment and obesity has varied across studies and geographical contexts. Here, we used deep learning and approximately 150,000 high resolution satellite images to extract features of the built environment. We then developed linear regression models to consistently quantify the association between the extracted features and obesity prevalence at the census tract level for six cities in the United States. The extracted features of the built environment explained 72% to 90% of the variation in obesity prevalence across cities. Outof-sample predictions were considerably high with correlations greater than 80% between predicted and true obesity prevalence across all census tracts. This study supports a strong association between the built environment and obesity prevalence. Additionally, it also illustrates that features of the built environment extracted from satellite images can be useful for studying health indicators, such as obesity. Understanding
Overweight and obesity in adults are known to be associated with risks of metabolic and cardiovascular diseases. Because obesity is an epidemic, increasingly affecting children, it is important to understand if this condition persists from early life to childhood and if different patterns of obesity growth can be detected. Our motivation starts from a study of obesity over time in children from South Eastern Asia. Our main focus is on clustering obesity patterns after adjusting for the effect of baseline information. Specifically, we consider a joint model for height and weight patterns taken every 6 months from birth. We propose a novel model that facilitates clustering by combining a vector autoregressive sampling model with a dependent logit stick-breaking prior. Simulation studies show the superiority of the model to capture patterns, compared to other alternatives. We apply the model to the motivating dataset, and discuss the main features of the detected clusters. We also compare alternative models with ours in terms of predictive performances.
Background: Bipolar disorder (BD) is a chronic, lifelong condition, associated with increased risk of obesity, cognitive impairment, and suicidal behaviors. Abdominal obesity and a higher risk of violent suicide attempt (SA) seem to be shared correlates with older age, BD, and male sex until middle age when menopause-related female body changes occur. This study aimed at assessing the role of abdominal obesity and cognition in the violent SA burden of individuals with BD.Methods: From the well-defined nationwide cohort FACE-BD (FondaMental Advanced center of Expertise for Bipolar Disorders), we extracted data on 619 euthymic BD patients that were 50 years or older at inclusion. Cross-sectional clinical, cognitive, and metabolic assessments were performed. SA history was based on self-report.Results: Violent SA, in contrast to non-violent and no SA, was associated with higher waist circumference, abdominal obesity and poorer California Verbal Learning Test short-delay free recall (CVLT-SDFR) (ANOVA, p < .001, p = .014, and p = .006). Waist circumference and abdominal obesity were associated with violent SA history independently of sex, BD type and anxiety disorder (Exp(B) 1.02, C
This paper investigates quantum obesity (QO), quantum discord (QD), and the quantum steering ellipsoid (QSE) for bipartite Gisin states subjected to Garfinkle-Horowitz-Strominger (GHS) dilation of spacetime on the second qubit. These three quantifiers are introduced to characterize quantum correlations beyond entanglement and can also function as entanglement witnesses. Our results demonstrate a monotonic decrease in the physical accessibility of both QD and QO as the dilation parameter increases within the region-I of the second qubit. Conversely, in the anti-particle region, the accessibility of QD and QO stabilizes at finite values of the dilation parameter owing to the influence of the Pauli exclusion principle and Fermi-Dirac statistics, subsequently increasing gradually. Notably, the QSE in the region-I expands as the Dirac field frequency rises and the dilation parameter diminishes, while the opposite trend is observed in the anti-particle region.