Morton JM, et al. - Because severe obesity is the leading public health crisis in the industrialized world, affecting men and women of every race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status, researchers ascertained if telomeres (repeating strands of DNA that flank mammalian chromosomes and protect coding DNA from progressive degradation after each replication) lengthen in obese patients before and after laparoscopic gastric bypass surgery. In addition to obesity, risk factors for aging-related dementia include insulin resistance, lipid abnormality, and inflammation. Other age-related changes include telomere shortening, which has implications like genomic instability and cancer and has been shown to be related to high body mass index (calculated as weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared). Telomeres progressively shorten with the aging process and have a negative correlation with oxidative stress and a severe inflammatory state in the peripheral blood. Findings revealed that data on the association between surgical weight loss and telomere length are currently mixed.