According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, close to one-third of the population in the United States is obese and another third is overweight. Excessive weight gain is elicited by alterations in energy balance, the finely modulated equilibrium between caloric intake and expenditure. But what are the factors that determine how much food is consumed” Part of the mystery is unfolding in the laboratory of Maribel Rios, PhD, at the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston. Through their work, Rios and colleagues have demonstrated for the first time that a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is critical in mediating satiety in adult mice. Their findings are published in the December 26 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. Mice in which the Bdnf gene was deleted in two of the primary appetite-regulating regions of the brain ate more and became significantly heavier than their counterparts. “Prior to this study, we knew that the global lack of BDNF and/or its receptor during development leads to overeating and obesity in young mice.

(No abstract is available for this citation)

(No abstract is available for this citation)

(No abstract is available for this citation)

This is the second volume in a series that explores the borderland between neurology and art. The rationale behind the existence of the collection is that when disease of the ...