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Overeating makes brain go haywire: study
(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-10-03 18:59 WASHINGTON - Overeating makes the brain go haywire, prompting a cascade of damage that may cause diabetes, heart disease and other ills, US researchers reported on Thursday.
Eating too much appears to activate a usually dormant immune system pathway in the brain, sending out immune cells to attack and destroy invaders that are not there, Dongsheng Cai of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and colleagues found. The finding, reported in the journal Cell, could help explain why obesity causes so many different diseases. It might also offer a way to prevent obesity itself.
Obesity is a growing global problem, with 1.8 billion people estimated to be overweight or obese in 2007. Drugs marketed so far to fight obesity have only limited success and, often, severe side-effects. Cai's team worked in mice, seeking to explain studies that have shown that obesity causes chronic inflammation throughout the body. This inflammation is found in a range of diseases related to obesity, including heart disease and diabetes. They homed in on a compound known as IKKbeta/NK-kappaB. Immune cells such as macrophages and leukocytes use it but Cai's team found it in the hypothalamus, a part of the brain linked with metabolism in mice and humans alike. "The hypothalamus is the 'headquarters' for regulating energy," they wrote. They found high levels of the compound there but it was normally inactive. |
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