Obesity is currently a significant health problem, as it causes serious health problems in children and can lead to various related disorders in adulthood. It is a condition of a positive energy balance over a prolonged period, at which caloric intake begins to surpass calorie consumption while reducing the amount of muscles and increasing the percentage of adipose tissue, that accumulates in the form of subcutaneous or visceral fat. According to data from 2016, 40 million children under the age of 5 and more than 330 million children between the ages of 5-19 were overweight or obese. Environment factors have a significant impact on the development of childhood obesity, while genetic factors represent between 30 to 50 % of all the causes, polygenic being more common. Most of the genes involved in regulating appetite and metabolism are associated with the leptin-melanocortin pathway. It consists of three arms; the afferent arm receives information from the periphery, the central processing unit, which processes information in the hypothalamus, and the efferent arm, which regulates energy intake and energy consumption through autonomous effectors. Leptin and adiponectin send information about the amount of peripheral adipose energy to the hypothalamus. Orexigenic pathway, agouti-related protein and neuropeptide Y are activated when energy mass is reduced. Anorexigenic pathway, melanocortin 3 and 4 receptor are activated, through proopiomelanocortin, when energy supply is increased. The goal of the study was to determine genetic variants in the selected panel of 15 genes associated with the leptin-melanocortin pathway with next-generation sequencing. Furthermore, we aimed to analysed their frequency in the test and control group and to identify genes with higher pathogenicity. The study included 1544 people between the ages of 2 and 19, among them 1216 in the test and 328 in the control group. The pathogenic and changes of unknown significance were found in 97 (8%) test and 13 (4%) control subjects, indicating a slightly higher percentage in the test group. Pathological and changes of unknown significance were present in almost all genes of the panel, the majority in LEPR, MC3R, MC4R, and POMC, previously associated with monogenetic obesity. MC4R was the most highly pathogenic gene with 9 different pathogenic and changes of unknown significance in 11 subjects from the test group. In addition, in MC4R, a significant increase in body weight was observed in subjects with pathological changes, compared to the subjects without pathological change.
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