The prevalence of overweight and obesity cases in contemporary industrialized nations is strikingly high. Davenport was among the first investigators to report data pertaining to the problem of heredity in body mass relative to stature. The interest for the genetics of human obesities has increased considerably during the last decade partly because of the realization that some forms of obesity were associated with high risks for various morbid conditions and mortality rate. The evidence accumulated over the last decade indicates that it is useful to distinguish several obesity phenotypes for the evaluation of the relationships between excess body fat and etiology of cardiovascular diseases and noninsulin dependent diabetes mellitus or the other risk factors for these diseases. In the context of genetic analysis of the various obesity phenotypes, knowledge about the determinants of these phenotypes can be extremely useful because they can be conceived as intermediate phenotypes that could be involved in the causal chain of factors leading to obesity.
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