Being overweight can delay the body’s response to flu virus
BEING overweight can delay and blunt the body’s response to the flu virus, research suggests.
Scientists have found people who are overweight are more likely to catch and spread the flu.
Around 50 per cent of the world population is considered to be overweight or obese.
Lead researcher Dr Stacey Schultz-cherry, of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Memphis, Tennessee, said: “We want to be careful about extrapolating too much from a mouse experiment, but the study does suggest that because of the problem with how cells respond to flu in an obese environment, individuals who are obese don’t have good antiviral responses.
“They are delayed, they are blunted.”
The flu virus changes every year and requires a new vaccine to be created to combat it.
Previous studies have shown overweight people have higher “virus loads”, meaning it can spread deeper into their lungs and for stay there for longer periods of time.
The team infected “lean” and “obese” mice with the virus for three days, which is enough time for it to change.
They then repeated the experiment, spreading the virus to more lean and obese mice.
Ms Schultz-cherry said: “Basically, we wanted to mimic what would happen during an epidemic where the virus goes from one person to the next.
“What happens if a virus goes from a lean person to a lean person to a lean person versus an obese person to an obese person to an obese person?”
They found when the virus passed from one obese mouse to another, it became more virulent – changing and replicating faster.
Dr Schultz-cherry said: “When you get infected with flu, it’s not just one virus, its a population. It’s like a little cocktail party and in this case, the cocktail party in the obese mice was a whole different matter.
“There were different populations and some of those viruses were more virulent than the strains that went from lean mouse to lean mouse”
The body’s response to the virus was also less effective in obese mice, giving it more time to grow.
The flu costs the UK more than 7.5 million working days a year, costing around £1.3 billion.
The team would like to carry out more tests in humans.