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Appetite brain cells discovered: A new study on obesity and brain
28.09.2023 02:50
Updated: 13.05.2024 21:23
Obesity is a huge health problem not only because of the weight damaging a human body, but also because of how it generally changes a person.
Scientists have discovered brain cells that can make you hungry, and these cells are only activated when you're obese.
Let's find out more about this discovery.
More about the research
A group of scientists at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research found some special brain cells that can make you feel more hungry when you have too much energy stored in your body, like extra fat in obesity.
These cells not only produce a substance called NPY that makes you want to eat but also make your brain more sensitive to NPY, so you feel even hungrier.
How it works
Obesity is a big problem that affects many people and can lead to other health issues like diabetes and heart disease.
Eating habits and how active we are can make us obese.
Our brain has a way of knowing how much energy we have stored, and it uses NPY to make us eat when we need more energy.
But when we have too much stored energy, like in obesity, NPY keeps telling our brain to eat, even when we don't need to.
The researchers found that some brain cells don't stop making NPY when we're obese.
These cells also make other parts of the brain more sensitive to NPY, making us even hungrier.
Why it's important to know
It's like a never-ending cycle that makes it hard to control our weight.
But understanding this can help us find new ways to fight obesity, like blocking the super-sensitive parts of our brain that listen too much to NPY.
This could lead to new medicines to help people with obesity.
