SOCIAL WORKERS have been told to think again about putting overweight children on "at risk" registers after scientists found that obesity can be linked to a genetic defect.
In the past three years dozens of parents in Britain have been accused of abusing their children through "overfeeding", with some youngsters being taken into care.
In one of the most extreme cases, in October, social workers went to a maternity ward in Dundee to remove a baby born 28 hours earlier.
The research, by Cambridge University, suggests many parents have been wrongly accused and that the problem lies in the children's chromosomes. Sadaf Farooqi, who runs the metabolic research laboratories, said: "We have found that part of chromosome 16 can be deleted in some families, and people with this deletion have severe obesity from a young age."
The results, published today in Nature, emerged from comparing the genomes of 300 obese children with those of 7,000 healthy volunteers.
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This showed many of the obese youngsters were missing the section of chromosome 16 that contains a gene known as SH2B1, which plays a key role in regulating weight. "They were left with a strong drive to eat and gained weight easily," said Farooqi.
Some of the 300 obese youngsters in the study were already on "at risk" registers as it was assumed their parents were overfeeding them. They have now been removed from the register, Farooqi said.
In February 2007 The Sunday Times reported on one of the first such "abuse by overfeeding" cases. It involved a boy of eight from Newcastle upon Tyne who weighed 14 stone and whose parents faced care proceedings. The intervention of social services in that case was seen as a landmark in fighting obesity.