(Press-News.org) The brain's effect on other parts of the body has been well established. Now, a group that includes two University of Florida Health researchers has found that it's a two-way street: Body fat can send a signal that affects the way the brain deals with stress and metabolism.
While the exact nature of those signals remains a mystery, researchers say simply knowing such a pathway exists and learning more about it could help break a vicious cycle: Stress causes a desire to eat more, which can lead to obesity. And too much extra fat can impair the body's ability to send a signal to the brain to shut off the stress response.
The findings are important and unique because they show that it's not simply the brain that drives the way the body responds to stress, said James Herman, Ph.D., a co-author of the paper and a professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at the University of Cincinnati,.
"It moved our understanding of stress control to include other parts of the body. Before this, everyone thought that the regulation of stress was mainly due to the brain. It's not just in the brain. This study suggests that stress regulation occurs on a much larger scale, including body systems controlling metabolism, such as fat," Herman said.
The findings, which reveal a novel fat-to-brain feedback network, were published in the June edition of the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology by a group that included Annette D. de Kloet, Ph.D., a research assistant professor in the UF College of Medicine's department of physiology and functional genomics, and Eric Krause, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the UF College of Pharmacy's department of pharmacodynamics.
Researchers found that a glucocorticoid receptor in fat tissue can affect the way the brain controls stress and metabolism. Initially, such signals from the receptor can be lifesavers, directing the brain to regulate its energy balance and influencing stress responses in a beneficial way.
"The stress response in the short term is adaptive. It's going to help you cope with stress," Krause said. "The idea that fat is actually talking to the brain to dampen stress is new."
The researchers found that steroid hormones known as glucocorticoids activate their receptors within fat tissue in a way that affects a main component of the metabolic stress response. Using mouse models, they found a unique connection between glucocorticoid signaling in fat tissue and the brain's regulation of energy balance and stress response. Because glucocorticoid signaling is crucial to regulating the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, fat tissue can directly affect central nervous system functions that link obesity, metabolic disease and stress-related problems, researchers concluded.
Understanding fat-to-brain signaling is a first step toward someday being able to influence the broad, complex relationship between stress, obesity and metabolism. Herman credited de Kloet for pressing the search for a fat-to-brain signaling network.
Now that researchers have established that a fat-to-brain signaling pathway exists, a fuller understanding of how it functions could someday lead to drugs or other therapies that ward off the negative effects of long-term stress.
"The big question is the nature of that signal to the brain. We need to learn how to go in and break that cycle of stress, eating and weight gain," Herman said.
INFORMATION:
The research was funded by National Institutes of Health grants MH069860, MH049698 and NS068122.
Many of the same genes may affect GCSE results across a broad range of subjects according to a new study from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King's College London.
The research, published today in Scientific Reports, also suggests that educational achievement at GCSE is highly heritable, with over half of the difference between results potentially due to inherited differences in DNA.
Previous studies have shown that academic achievement in the core subjects of English, mathematics and science at GCSE may be influenced by the same genetic traits. ...
Philadelphia, PA, July 23, 2015 - Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI) can have devastating consequences. Both are associated with high rates of disability and suicide, and although they are separate conditions, they commonly co-occur. For example, a soldier who has developed PTSD as a result of a traumatic experience may have also sustained a brain injury during that experience.
Significant research has been conducted to understand the brain mechanisms underlying PTSD and TBI, but there has still been a lack of knowledge regarding exactly ...
New research by health scientists at the University of York has revealed that a greater proportion of men than women suffer from cannabis psychosis.
There has been much research exploring the nature of the relationship between cannabis -- the most widely used illicit drug in the United Kingdom -- and psychosis, however the role of gender in relation to cannabis psychosis is less well explored and understood.
A new study by researchers in the Department of Health Sciences at York used large datasets over a period of 11 years to investigate the differences in men and ...
A new drug that blocks cancer's escape route from chemotherapy could be used to treat deadly lung and pancreatic cancers, new research reports.
Scientists have shown in human cancer cells and in mice that the drug - discovered at The Institute of Cancer Research, London - boosts the effectiveness of conventional chemotherapy.
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The new study is published ...
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In a paper published by the Journal of Physical ...
Contact between children and fathers following parental separation facilitates the continued abuse of women and children, according to new research focusing on the experiences of families with a prior history of domestic abuse conducted by social work experts at Trinity College Dublin.
The research, which explored the experiences of post-separation fathering in families with prior history of domestic abuse perpetrated by the father against the mother, involved the completion of survey questionnaires 219 mothers regarding their 449 children as well as face-to-face interviews ...
TAMPA, Fla. - Recent advances in the understanding of cancer have led to more personalized therapies, such as drugs that target particular proteins and tests that analyze gene expression patterns in tumors to predict a patient's response to therapy. Moffitt Cancer Center researchers have contributed to these advances by developing the first test that analyzes the sensitivity of tumors to radiation therapy. They discovered that colon cancer metastases have varying sensitivity to radiation therapy based on their anatomic location.
Researchers from Moffitt previously developed ...
An algorithm dubbed ENVE could be the Google for genetic aberrations -- and it comes from Case Western Reserve.
Remember the World Wide Web before the famed search engine? The web offered extraordinary amounts of information, but no consistently reliable way to secure relevant results.
Cancer researchers at Case Western Reserve encountered a comparable conundrum when considering reams of data about the body that new technological advances provide -- how could they tell what parts of the information actually offer value. In this instance, the goal was to distinguish ...
This news release is available in German.
Organic molecules allow producing printable electronics and solar cells with extraordinary properties. In spintronics, too, molecules open up the unexpected possibility of controlling the magnetism of materials and, thus, the spin of the flowing electrons. According to what is reported in Nature Materials by a German-French team of researchers, a thin layer of organic molecules can stabilize the magnetic orientation of a cobalt surface. (DOI: 10.1038/NMAT4361)
"This special interaction between organic molecules and metal ...
Reintroducing a species into an area where it has vanished can be a great tool for conservation, but for reintroduction to be successful it's crucial to understand how the habitat has changed in the interim and whether the reintroduced species will be able to thrive in its former home. Extirpated in the 1960s as a result of human activity, Bald Eagles (Haleiaeetus leucocephalus) have been reintroduced to California's Channel Islands over the last 35 years. A study published this week in The Condor: Ornithological Applications examined the diets of these reestablished eagles ...
