La obesidad y su relación con los contaminantes ambientales, la alimentación y los mecanismos epigenéticos

Abstract

Introduction: Obesity is a chronic disease resulting from environmental, psychological and genetic factors. The objective was to carry out a bibliometry of the scientific literature on this pathology related to environmental pollutants, food and epigenetics, to elucidate lines of research. Materials and method: The documents were managed from the Web of Science database. The search strategy was Obesity AND (pollution OR contamination) in the Titles field, AND (epigenetic * OR obesity OR food OR nutrition OR diet) in Themes. 654 articles were found: 577 original investigations and 77 reviews. The articles were exported in BibTeX format to be analyzed with the Bibliometrix program. Results: The evolution of the production of reports per year has been upward. In 2020, the average number of references of the original articles was 38 and of the review articles, 200. Based on the Lotka index combined with the h index, the most prominent author was Joel Schwartz. The United States concentrated the largest production of scientific articles, which coincides with the location of the institutions with the highest affiliation of the authors. The 5 most frequent keywords were: air pollution, particulate matter, obesity, pollution and epigenetics. Conclusions: A line of research on obesity linked to DNA methylation, oxidative stress and PM2.5 is proposed; which will contribute to reducing this pandemic and, therefore, will impact the morbidity and mortality profiles of non-communicable diseases and COVID-19.