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Public release date: 25 November 2008
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Brain may fight obesity and hunger
A mixed scientific team of Yale University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute has identified a fatty substance made
in the gut that signals the brain when it's time to stop eating.
Scientists showed that a naturally occurring fat-derived chemical messenger called NAPE regulated how much the animals
ate. NAPE is concentrated in the hypothalamus (part of brain), an important brain structure known to regulate hunger, and inhibited neurons that stimulate appetite. For the moment experiments only targeted mice and rats, and have shown that when the rodents were fed a fatty meal, their small intestine made a lot of NAPE and put it into the bloodstream. Then the chemical messenger traveled to the brain and shut down hunger signals.
The researchers then synthesized NAPE and injected it into the abdomen of the animals, whose appetites diminished greatly. Experiments also revealed that when the rodents were given extra NAPE for five days, they animals ate less and lost weight.
Researchers said that NAPE is present in people and may do the same thing and they recently started the fat-feeding studies in humans to confirm if they get a similar NAPE reaction in human blood.
Experiments have shown that the NAPEs work to suppress appetite or decrease food intake. But feeding is a complex behavior. These some encouraging observations give big hopes that NAPEs could be used in supplementary fashion to treat obesity in humans.
With obesity on the rise in many parts of the world this new discovery could inspire new approaches to fighting it. As people eat fattier diets and get less exercise, scientists are eager to find if NAPE is the right opportunity to combat the problem.
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