肥胖可以造成嚴重的健康問題,並且會增加疾病罹患率以及死亡率。造成肥胖的確實原因目前仍不清楚,很多方面均可能會造成肥胖。肥胖可以透過身體中的各種免疫反應介質作用,最後導致身體內的免疫反應下降。研究指出肥胖者比起體重正常者更容易遭受各種感染,包括院內感染和手術後感染。另外目前全球肥胖快速增加的速率,類似於流行性疾病的傳播模式,導致有「感染造成肥胖」的假說出現。數種病原菌被指出和肥胖相關。其中腺病毒36型是第一個被發現在動物中可以導致肥胖的人類腺病毒。肥胖和感染之間究竟是單純因果關係或是還合併有其他的因子目前仍不清楚,需要未來更多的研究去釐清兩者間的關係。
Obesity is a public health problem associated with increased morbidity and mortality. The exact causes for obesity are still unclear, it seems that it follows a multi-factorial model of causation. Obesity has a clear but yet not precisely defined effect on the immune response through a variety of immune mediators. Many researches showed that obese people are more likely to develop infections of various types including nosocomial infections and postoperative infections than average-weight people. On the other hand, the rapid global spread of obesity resembles the spread of infectious disease epidemiologically. There were considerations that obesity could have an infectious origin. Several pathogens are reported to cause obesity in animal model. Among them, adenovirus 36 was the first human pathogen reported to cause obesity. The question of whether the relation of obesity and infection is simply casual or maybe related to other confounding factors is still unclear. Further investigation is required to further elucidate their relationship.