Contagious Obesity

Is Obesity Socially Contagious?

A social contagious model of the obesity epidemic

Obesity has been recognized as a global epidemic by WHO, followed by many empirical evidences to prove its infectiousness. However, the inter-person spreading dynamics of obesity are seldom studied. A distinguishing feature of the obesity epidemic is that it is driven by a social contagion process which cannot be perfectly described by the infectious disease models. In this paper, we propose a ...

Contagious obesity: from adenovirus 36 to RB dysfunction

Significant overweight represents a major health problem in industrialized countries. Besides its known metabolic origins, this condition may also have an infectious cause, as recently postulated. Here, it is surmised that the potentially causative adenovirus 36 contributes to such disorder by inactivating the retinoblastoma tumor suppressor protein (RB) in a manner reminiscent of a mechanism e...

Is obesity contagious? Social networks vs. environmental factors in the obesity epidemic.

This note's aim is to investigate the sensitivity of Christakis and Fowler's claim [Christakis, N., Fowler, J., 2007. The spread of obesity in a large social network over 32 years. The New England Journal of Medicine 357, 370-379] that obesity has spread through social networks. It is well known in the economics literature that failure to include contextual effects can lead to spurious inferenc...

Contagious Cancer

Although cancer can on occasion be caused by infectious agents such as specific bacteria, parasites, and viruses, it is not generally considered a transmissible disease. In rare circumstances, however, direct communication from one host to another has been documented. The Tasmanian devil is now threatened with extinction in the wild because of a fatal transmissible cancer, devil facial tumor di...