What is severe obesity doing to the heart muscle’s ability to contract? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Severe obesity may impede the ability of units inside heart muscle cells called sarcomeres to contract, and losing weight may reverse that condition. That’s according to research by cardiologist David Kass and colleagues at Johns Hopkins, who looked closely at the heart muscle cells of people with a type of heart failure, those who did not have the condition, and those about to get a heart transplant. An AI algorithm divided them into two groups.

Kass: The one group has a body mass index average of around 30 which is technically obese. The other ones at 42 that's basically now a category people are calling severe obesity. What has obesity actually really done to the sarcomeres? Whether the motor proteins how they're working even though people have thought because you have preserved ejection fraction turns out your muscle proteins and their structure they're very depressed. The only group that it was similar to was patients who just had a heart transplant.       :31

When those in the severe obesity group lost weight, their heart function improved. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.