A tiny part of the brain called the preoptic area that regulates body temperature in warm-blooded animals might be the key to regulating weight, according to new study from LSU’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center.
Pennington Professor Dr. Heike Muenzberg-Gruening and her team found that, in addition to maintaining the mice’s body temperature, this part of the brain reacts to leptin, a hormone that regulates energy balance, to change how their bodies spent or took in energy.
“This fact has largely been overlooked in the past,” says Muenzberg-Gruening in a news release.
The study shows that the preoptic area helps mice regulate their body weight in a separate feedback loop from how the same area regulates temperature, and this information could be used to slow weight gain in people.
The study’s lead author is Dr. Sangho Yu, an assistant professor in the Neurobiology of Energy Balance. Yu says the next step for the team is to see if it is possible to stimulate cells in the preoptic area so the brain slows down food intake without triggering the body to slow down energy use, so a person would lose weight.
The study was published Tuesday in the eLife journal.
