People With Genetic Risk of Obesity Need More Exercise to Mitigate It

People with increased polygenic risk scores for higher body mass index (BMI) would need to walk about 2300 more steps each day to have the same risk of obesity as those with lower scores, a recent retrospective study in JAMA Network Open found. Polygenic risk scores reflect the risk of disease determined by many variants in a person’s DNA. The results suggest that exercise recommendations that don’t take genetic predispositions for obesity into account might underestimate the amount of activity individuals might need to reduce their risk, the researchers noted.