Emotional Eating
It was reported at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Orlando, Florida this past week that shutting down the brain's pleasure center might be the key to weight control. Researcher Ann Kelley from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Medical School injected mice with pleasure-inducing opioid compounds that in turn resulted in the mice eating up much more fat than normal. She injected another group of mice with a compound that blocked activity in the amygdala, the area of the brain that processes emotions, and found that those mice completely ignored fat. Somehow, though, I don't see people undergoing operations to reduce the amount of pleasure that they feel in life. We'll see how applicable this one becomes. The key simply knowing the extent to which unlearning or never learning the associations of pleasurable feelings to eating might temper a person's prediliction to overeating.
Brain Implants
Researchers at Emory University have had success in their research of deep brain stimulation as a method for treating Parkinson's symptoms. Monkeys with electrodes implanted within their subthalamic nuclei experienced improvements in their uncoordinated, involuntary movements. It is thought that this might one day become a treatment used in humans to treat Parkinson's like symptoms.
Statins for Sclerosis
Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco have shown that statins, compounds used to treat high cholesterol and heart disease, might act to reduce inflammation in the nervous system. Specifically, they think that the drugs might be successful as a treatment for multiple scerosis (MS). In an experiment involving mice with MS symptoms as subjects, those receiving treatment with statins experienced recovery or fewer relapse type symptoms as well as reduced inflammation in the brain. It seems that a drug called Atorvastatin (Lipitor) might act on the T-cells of the immune system, which in MS patients actually attack the nervous system. Atorvastatin might keep them from attacking and make them work to reduce inflammation instead. Researchers hope to begin human clinical trials in the next few months to determine the applicability of Atorvastatin as a treatment for the relapsing-remitting symptoms of MS.
current science news posted by Kirsten at 11/08/2002 12:54:00 PM
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