Study of the usefulness of human peripheral blood mononuclear cells for the analysis of metabolic recovery after weight loss (METAHEALTH-TEST)

The aim of this study is to design and validate a test, METAHEALTH-TEST, based on gene expression analysis in blood cells, to quickly and easily analyse metabolic health. This test will be used to analyse metabolic improvement in overweight/obese individuals and in metabolically obese normal-weight (MONW) individuals after undergoing a weight loss intervention and/or an intervention for improvement in eating habits and lifestyle. Obesity and its medical complications are a serious health problem today. Using peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) as an easily obtainable source of transcriptomic biomarkers would allow to deepen into the knowledge of adaptations in response to increased adiposity that occur in internal homeostatic tissues, without the need of using invasive biopsies. Moreover, if PBMC were able to reflect lipid metabolism gene expression pattern recovery as a result of weight loss, it would provide valuable information to know the efficacy of therapies aimed at weight loss and, in any case, it would allow to personalize them according to the evolution of obese patients until the desired metabolic recovery is achieved.