For Some, Weight Gain Caused By a Virus?

For some people, can weight gain have been caused by a virus? Studies have shown that this is possible and this virus called AD-36 may just look like a common cold but really is a virus that creates more fat cells.

Some Obesity Cases May Be Due to Virus
By: Madeline Ellis
Published: Thursday, 29 January 2009

If you’ve put on some extra weight lately for no apparent reason you may be able to attribute the gain to a highly infectious virus known as AD-36. With symptoms similar to the common cold—runny nose, sore throat, swollen glands—the virus is passed from person-to-person through coughs, sneezes, and dirty hands. First infecting the lungs, it then whisks around to other parts of the body entering fat cells. “When this virus goes to fat tissue it replicates, making more copies of itself and in the process increases the number of new fat cells, which may explain why the fat tissue expands and why people get fat when they are infected with this virus,” explains Professor Nikhil Dhurandhar of Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana, who has researched this theory for more than a decade. More...