Brain can help cure diabetes, obesity says study

A new study has demonstrated that the curing of weight gain, obesity, and diabetes could be as simple as keeping a nuclear receptor from being activated in a small part of the brain.

The study by Yale School of Medicine researchers showed that when the researchers blocked the effects of the nuclear receptor PPARgamma in a small number of brain cells in mice, the animals ate less and became resistant to a high-fat diet.

Lead author Sabrina Diano, professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at Yale School of Medicine asserted that these animals ate fat and sugar, and did not gain weight, while their control littermates gained weight on the same diet.

Diano said that when they blocked PPARgamma in these hypothalamic cells, they found an increased level of free radical formation in POMC neurons, and they were more active.

Diano further said that their study suggested that the increased weight gain in diabetic patients treated with TZD could be due to the effect of this drug in the brain, therefore, targeting peripheral PPARgamma to treat type 2 diabetes should be done by developing TZD compounds that could not break in the brain.

The study is published in the issue of The Journal of Clinical Investigation (JCI).

What is obesity?

Obesity refers to increased body fat but it is not same as being overweight. A person who is overweight need not be obese but a person who is obese is overweight. Overweight is the term used for a person who weighs more. The weight can be muscle weight, bone weight or fat weight. But a person is said to be obese when he/she consumes more number of calories than the number of calories used by the body. If your Body Mass Index or BMI (calculated by dividing height by weight) is more than 30, then you are obese.

With inputs from ANI

Photo source: Getty Images

You may also like to read:

• Sample diet plan for diabetics
• Revealed why being obese makes a person slower!
• Gene linked to obesity responsible for weight gain

For more on diabetes, check out our diabetes section and Diabetes page. For more articles on obesity, visit our obesity section. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter for all the latest updates! For daily free health tips, sign up for our newsletter. And to join discussions on health topics of your choice, visit our forum.