The TV adverts by Nick Park's Aardman Animations featuring plasticine figures is the centrepiece of the Change4Life drive to reduce the 9,000 premature deaths linked to obesity in Britain every year.

The campaign, which includes 75 million pounds of government marketing cash over three years, and support from 33 companies, aims to reverse the forecast that by 2050 up to 90 percent of today's children will be overweight or obese.

"Change4Life has a critical ambition, we are trying to create a lifestyle revolution on a huge scale, something which no government has attempted before," said public health minister Dawn Primarolo.

Chief Medical Officer Liam Donaldson said people were increasingly ignorant of the risks of over-eating and lack of activity.

"The research we undertook for this campaign showed that only six percent of people understood the links between obesity, overweight and adverse health effects," he said.

The first brightly coloured Nick Park advert shows primitive man evolving from a hunter gathering his own food to a sedentary lifestyle in front of the TV before he is shocked into taking exercise by illustrations of fat pumping around the body.

The campaign slogan is "Eat well, move more, live longer".

"Sexual dysfunction should be considered one of the numerous potentially reversible complications of obesity," the study team concludes.

Dr. Ramsey M. Dallal, from Albert Einstein Healthcare Network, Philadelphia, and colleagues measured the degree to which 97 morbidly obese men suffered from sexual dysfunction and then analyzed the change in sexual function after substantial weight loss following gastric bypass surgery.

Before surgery, the morbidly obese men had significantly lower sexual function relative to that of a previously published reference control group of men before surgery, the investigators report.

After losing an average of two thirds of their excess weight, men experienced significant improvements in sexual function, with the amount of weight loss predicting the degree of improvement.

"We estimate that a man who is morbidly obese has the same degree of sexual dysfunction as a nonobese man about 20 years older," the investigators report. "Sexual function improves substantially after gastric bypass surgery to a level that reaches or approaches age-based norms."

"Sexual function is an important aspect to quality of life and is now well documented to be a reversible condition," Dallal explained.

"We are interested in examining sexual function in females, as well as understanding the mechanism of obesity-related sexual dysfunction," Dallal added.

SOURCE: Journal of the American College of Surgeons, December 2008.

Judith Kresge sought help from a family friend on Christmas Eve after getting no response to repeated calls to her daughter's bedroom, police said Wednesday. The friend found Wendy Kresge's body in her bed and called the police.

Investigators discovered deplorable conditions and no running water in the Stroud Township home and deemed it unfit for the surviving woman and the animals.

Kresge is not ambulatory and spent her time on a couch strewn with trash bags, clothing and other items, the police report said. She told police she kept a cooler with food in it nearby, although she could not find it the day they arrived. They found the bird cages filthy.

"Because of the handicapped mother, the condition of the trailer, the 60 birds, the nonfunctioning toilet, basically, we determined it to be unfit living conditions," said Lt. Brian Kimmins of the Stroud Area Regional Police.

Kresge was uncooperative, refusing to surrender the birds or leave her home after her daughter's death, officials said. A relative finally persuaded her to accept a move to an assisted living facility, while the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals charged her with animal neglect and cruelty in order to get a search warrant and remove the birds, Kimmins said.

The birds included macaws, parrots, parakeets and lovebirds, police said.

"I suspect that it was a typical hoarding case," Kimmins said.

Wendy Kresge, 45, who weighed more than 500 pounds, died of natural causes, the Monroe County coroner's office said.

The home is located in a trailer park about 80 miles north of Philadelphia. Several welfare agencies were aware of the family, but the severity of the women's problems was not apparent, Kimmins said.

"They weren't off the radar. The Office of the Aging had a case, the SPCA had a case," he said. "They always seemed to be just below the level required to take action against somebody who does not want to be assisted."

Researchers found that of 253 women who were followed during pregnancy, those who were overweight or obese had a far lower rate of preterm delivery compared with normal-weight or underweight women. Just over 8 percent gave birth before the 35th week of pregnancy, versus nearly 22 percent of normal-weight or underweight women.

All of the women in the study were considered to be at higher-than-normal risk of preterm delivery because of previous preterm births or bleeding problems during the current pregnancy. But excess weight seemed to lower this risk, the researchers report in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology.

The reason may be related to differences in the frequency of uterine contractions, according to the investigators, led by Dr. Hugh M. Ehrenberg of Ohio State University Medical Center in Columbus.

They found that normal-weight and underweight women tended to have more contractions between the 22nd and 34th weeks of pregnancy.

The explanation for this finding is not clear, but may have to do with the fact that body fat affects hormone levels, which may in turn affect the frequency of uterine contractions during pregnancy, the researchers note.

Whatever the reason, they conclude, the findings suggest that when doctors screen women for their risk of preterm birth, overweight women who show uterine-contraction patterns similar to those of thinner women may need to be considered high-risk for early delivery.

SOURCE: Obstetrics & Gynecology, January 2009.

The heaviest men were also at triple the risk of having a low count of progressively motile sperm -- sperm that swim forward in a straight line, Dr. Ahmad O. Hammoud of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and colleagues found.

"There is a strong relationship between overweight and obesity and altered sperm parameters," Hammoud and his team write. Future studies should look at this relationship over time, they say, as well as how weight loss might affect sperm characteristics.

There has been some evidence that obesity may impair fertility in men, the researchers note, while increased body fat can contribute to lower testosterone levels and higher estrogen levels. To examine how body mass index (BMI) affects sperm quality, they evaluated 390 men who sought infertility treatment with their partners over a 2-year period.

Twenty-four percent of the men were normal weight, 43 percent were overweight, and 33 percent were obese. Overall, 10.5 percent had low sperm counts.

The prevalence of low sperm counts rose as BMI increased; obese men were 3.3 times more likely to have low sperm counts than normal-weight men. The risk of having a low count of progressively mobile sperm also rose with BMI; obese men were 3.4 times more likely than normal-weight men to have a low progressively mobile sperm count. Obese men were also 1.6 times more likely than overweight or normal-weight men to have a high percentage of abnormally shaped sperm.

While there was a trend toward increasing likelihood of erectile dysfunction with increasing BMI, the relationship wasn't statistically significant. However, the researchers note, other studies have found that obesity is associated with a greater risk of impotence.

The fact that the study was done among men seeking infertility treatment makes it likely that the study group had worse sperm quality than the population at large, Hammoud and colleagues point out. Nevertheless, they add, the correlation of poor sperm quality and increased BMI in the general population is probably similar.

SOURCE: Fertility and Sterility, December 2008.

Also called bariatric surgery, the procedure works by limiting the size of the stomach and thereby reducing the amount of food one can eat. In this study, researchers used the Roux-en-Y method, which involves placing an adjustable band to block off most of the stomach. The band limits how much food the body absorbs.

"Previous studies have shown frequent remission of type 2 diabetes in adults following bariatric surgery, but until now, no research had been done to provide information about outcomes of adolescent diabetics who are considering surgical weight loss," said lead researcher Dr. Thomas H. Inge, an associate professor of surgery and pediatrics at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center.

"Our study found that, in most cases, teens can lose one-third of their weight and come off diabetes medications with remission of their diabetes one year after bypass surgery. This is certainly not the case for similar diabetic teenage patients who did not undergo surgery," Inge noted.

The report is published in the January issue of Pediatrics.

For the study, Inge's group looked at 78 teens with type 2 diabetes. Eleven patients underwent gastric bypass surgery, while the other 67 patients received usual care for their diabetes.

For the teens who had surgery, not only did they have an average 34 percent reduction in their weight, but their diabetes went into remission. Teens that did not have surgery saw an average weight loss of less than two pounds and still needed their diabetes medication.

"In addition to the impressive weight loss and type 2 diabetes results, patients undergoing the gastric bypass surgery also showed significant improvement in blood pressure, insulin, glucose, cholesterol and triglyceride levels," Inge said.

Type 2 diabetes takes a huge toll on the body, and the earlier it starts, the more of an impact it can have, Inge explained.

"These early surgical research findings suggest that diabetes may not be a diagnosis kids have to live with for the rest of their lives," Inge said. "They may not have to face diabetic retinopathy, progressive coronary heart disease and renal failure. In fact, there is good reason to be optimistic about their future cardiovascular health."

"If you are a type 2 diabetic and morbidly obese, gastric bypass surgery should be considered in the treatment pathway," Inge added.

Dr. David L. Katz, director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine, thinks that while surgery is effective it does not deal with the cause of the obesity epidemic among teens.

"Bariatric surgery is clearly effective in treating severe obesity, preventing and reversing type 2 diabetes, and even extending survival when applied to adults," Katz said. "That similar benefits ensue when the procedure is applied to adolescents is important, but by no means surprising."

Despite the success of surgery, these results should be viewed with caution, Katz said.

"A large and growing proportion of all children and adolescents are subject to obesity, and its complications," Katz said. "Surgery can mitigate those complications, but can we really condone ushering more and more young people through the OR doors for a major surgical procedure to fix what policies and programs that foster healthful eating and regular activity could have prevented in the first place?"

Gastric bypass surgery is an effective last resort for severe obesity in adolescence, as in adulthood, Katz said. "But a last resort it should be, and we should do all we can to minimize the need for this procedure by combating the root causes of obesity in our society."

More information

For more on gastric bypass surgery, visit the U.S. National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

The symptoms in heavy children are "strikingly reminiscent of excessive daytime sleepiness patterns in adults with obstructive sleep apnea," Drs. David Gozal and Leila Kheirandish-Gozal of the University of Louisville in Kentucky write. The findings suggest, they add, that obstructive sleep apnea looks different in obese children than it does in normal weight kids, which may have implications both for how the condition is treated and how it ultimately affects organ function.

The researchers previously observed that among children with sleep problems, daytime tiredness seemed to be the main symptom in obese kids, while sleepiness tended to manifest itself as inattention and hyperactivity for normal-weight children.

To investigate their hypothesis that kids with the same level of snoring severity would be more likely to be sleepy during the day if they were obese, they observed 50 healthy 6- to 9-year-old, normal-weight children who were habitual snorers and 50 obese children, also snorers, who had been matched by gender, age and ethnicity.

Children were observed for a full night of sleep in the lab, and then the researchers conducted a multiple sleep latency test, which assessed the degree of sleepiness by measuring the time it took the children to fall asleep during the day. The test involved giving the children a chance to nap for 30 minutes every 2 hours, beginning at 8 a.m. Each child had five nap opportunities.

On average, the obese children took 12.9 minutes to fall asleep, compared with 17.9 minutes for the non-obese children. Twenty-one of the obese kids had sleep latency times of 12 minutes or less, while just 5 of the normal-weight children did. Daytime sleepiness was most strongly associated with how many times a child woke up every hour due to respiratory disturbances.

This suggests, the researchers say, that sleep fragmentation my be more common in obese children and that a lack of oxygen during sleep may play a significant role in triggering the biological response that ultimately leads to increased daytime sleepiness.

While obstructive sleep apnea was more common among the obese children than the slimmer children, obese children without the condition were still more likely to have excessive daytime sleepiness than their slimmer counterparts.

Both obesity and obstructive sleep apnea are disorders related to low-level, system-wide inflammation, the researchers add. So both conditions could act together to further increase the levels of inflammation- and sleepiness-promoting substances in the body, the researchers suggest.

While the mechanism behind the link requires further study, they conclude, for now, children with symptoms of excessive daytime sleepiness who have trouble staying awake should be evaluated for obstructive sleep apnea.

SOURCE: Pediatrics, January 2009.

All but one of the 11 extremely obese teens studied saw their diabetes disappear within a year after weight-loss surgery, the researchers reported. The 11th patient still had diabetes, but needed much less insulin and stopped taking diabetes pills.

Previous studies have shown the diabetes benefits of obesity surgery for adults. Dr. Thomas Inge, a pediatric surgeon at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, and his colleagues wanted to find out if the same was true for adolescents.

Although more research is needed, Inge said the study "opens the door" to weight-loss surgery as a treatment option for severely obese teens with Type 2 diabetes.

The results are in the January issue of Pediatrics and are being released Monday.

About a third of U.S. youngsters are either overweight or obese. Increasing numbers of obese children are being diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease and the one linked to obesity. It was seldom seen before in kids.

"It's marching south through the generations, which is very scary," said Dr. Larry Deeb, a former president of the American Diabetes Association and a spokesman for the group.

Teen candidates for weight-loss surgery need to be carefully selected, he said, since the long-term consequences of the operation for children aren't yet known.

The 11 patients in the study were 14 to 21 years old and all were extremely obese, ranging from 250 to 403 pounds. They were taking diabetes pills and one was on insulin. At five different medical centers, they had gastric bypass surgery, or stomach stapling, to reduce their stomach to a small pouch.

They were compared to 67 mostly obese teens with diabetes at Cincinnati Children's whose blood sugar was being controlled through diet or medication.

After one year, those who had surgery had lost between 72 and 218 pounds, although none had dropped to a normal weight. For 10 of them, their diabetes was in remission and they stopped taking diabetes medicine.

For the teens who didn't have surgery, they all still had diabetes after a year and there was no difference in their weight or their use of diabetes medication. Their blood sugar levels did improve, the researchers said.

As for the one surgery patient whose diabetes wasn't reversed, the researchers said the reason wasn't known, but they noted his mother and a younger sibling also had Type 2 diabetes. Three years after the surgery, the teen was no longer overweight but still needed to take insulin.

Another explanation could be that his diabetes was more advanced that the other teens, Inge said. Adult studies have indicated that the chances of diabetes reversal are better the sooner surgery is done after diagnosis, he said.

"We caught the others in early stage of disease," Inge said. "Did we miss the boat on this one?"

___

On the Net:

Pediatrics: http://www.aap.org/

American Diabetes Association: http://www.diabetes.org/

"Most published series are from high-volume expert centers," according to lead investigator Dr. Richard Marsk from Danderyd Hospital, Stockholm. "We have shown that bariatric surgery can be performed with low mortality on a national level."

Marsk and colleagues assessed deaths from any cause after weight loss surgery in Sweden using data from 14,768 bariatric procedures conducted between 1980 and 2005.

The early post-surgery death rate ranged from 0.2 percent at 30 days to 0.3 percent at 90 days, they report, with a 1-year cumulative death rate of 0.5 percent.

The 1-year cumulative death rate adjusted for age was higher for men (1.1 percent) than for women (0.4 percent) and higher for patients older than age 50 (1.2 percent) than for patients younger than age 50 (0.4 percent).

Including the entire follow-up period, the age-adjusted death rate was twice as high for men (100 per 10,000 persons per year) than for women (50 per 10,000 persons per year).

"I believe that the increased mortality seen among men is due to increased preoperative co-morbid disease and also later referral to surgery, such that men to a greater extent have established cardiovascular disease at the time of surgery," Marsk said.

"Further studies are needed to explain this in full," he added.

Cumulative mortality did not differ between patients having primary surgery or "revisional" surgery, the researchers note.

The most common causes of death during the first year after weight loss surgery were non-heart related, the investigators report, whereas the most common causes of late death were heart attack and cancer.

SOURCE: Annals of Surgery, November 2008.

The study, which involved more than 500,000 adolescents at middle schools and high schools in California, lends new fuel to a growing backlash against the fast-food industry as studies suggest they contribute to the rising obesity epidemic in the United States.

"We've basically discovered that kids who are going to a school that is near a fast-food restaurant have a higher chance of being overweight and obese than kids who are at a school that is not near a fast-food restaurant," said Brennan Davis of Azusa Pacific University in California, whose study appears in the American Journal of Public Health.

U.S. youth obesity rates have tripled since 1980, although they leveled off this decade. The government says 32 percent of U.S. children are overweight and 16 percent are obese.

Consumer groups have pushed for laws such as July's moratorium on new fast-food restaurants in certain Los Angeles neighborhoods, while the food industry often maintains that a lack of exercise is more to blame.

The researchers said it is not yet clear whether their results apply to other parts of the United States, and this should be studied further.

But their study adds to prior research showing that fast-food restaurants tend to be clustered near schools.

"We are actually making a connection between fast food proximity to schools and obesity," Davis said in a telephone interview.

"Students who were exposed to nearby fast food have a higher level of body mass index -- they weigh more. They are more likely to be overweight and obese," he said.

For the study, Davis and colleagues examined the relationship between fast-food restaurants located within one half mile of schools and obesity among middle and high school students in California.

They took weight and dietary information from a statewide school survey between 2002 and 2005 and cross referenced the data with a database of top fast food chains located near each school.

"Overall, our patterns are consistent with the idea that fast food near schools affects students' eating habits, overweight and obesity," Davis and colleagues wrote.

They also found that students whose schools were located near-fast food restaurants eat fewer servings of vegetables and fruits, and drink far more soda than students at schools not located near fast-food restaurants.

The study could not determine why fast-food restaurants near schools have such an impact, but Davis said it likely goes well beyond access to burgers, fries and tacos.

"A nearby fast-food restaurant is really a hangout place for people to socialize," Davis said.

(Editing by Anthony Boadle)