A linear correlation between IL-6 and age has been established with an increase of 0.016 pg/ml per year of life.47 This has not been found to be true for CRP. Previous studies show a 40-50% decrease in IL-6 and CRP with weight loss and display medium to large effect sizes.33,35 The effect size for TNF- α is much smaller.33,35 Thus, we predict that we will be able to identify a statistically significant decrease in IL-6 and CRP with a sample size of 40, while it will be unlikely that our TNF- α results will reach significance. Nevertheless, TNF- α is a central player in the adipocytokine cascade, and identifying trends in the relationships between TNF- α and the other markers remains a valuable endeavor. The normal increase of IL-6 with age will be accounted for in our analysis by entering age as a covariate.