Our future weight is determined by the development of the brain at the stage of fetal life, argue US scientists in the pages of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
For many years, scientists have been trying to figure out why some people on the same high-fat Western diet gain weight and develop diabetes while others stay thin.
Scientists from the group of Professor Tamas Horvath at the Yale School of Medicine analyzed this mystery by examining a group of rats. The rodents were bred on a high-calorie, high-fat diet, but their brains were tested prior to the start of the experiment. It turned out that animals that tend to gain weight have a differently built center of hunger and satiety in the brain.
Neurons, whose task is to signal the eaten meal and the need to burn the provided calories, act more slowly in animals prone to obesity, because their activity is inhibited by other cells. In turn, in rodents resistant to obesity, these neurons are much more active and efficiently inform the brain and other tissues of the body about the food consumed.
As emphasized by the authors of the research, these are differences at the level of the basic innervation of the brain and are formed during the formation of nerve connections during the development of the brain. Another negative consequence of ineffective functioning of the hunger and satiety center neurons is the susceptibility to brain inflammation in obese people, which explains their difficulty in losing weight.
It is very important to investigate what genetic, epigenetic (not DNA sequence, but gene expression) and environmental factors influence the innervation of this region of the brain, Professor Horvath underlines. It is especially important to know the influence of the mother’s organism on the developing brain of the fetus, adds the scientist. (PAP)