Leptin regulates striatal regions and human eating behavior - PubMed (original) (raw)

Clinical Trial

. 2007 Sep 7;317(5843):1355.

doi: 10.1126/science.1144599. Epub 2007 Aug 9.

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Clinical Trial

Leptin regulates striatal regions and human eating behavior

I Sadaf Farooqi et al. Science. 2007.

Abstract

Studies of the fat-derived hormone leptin have provided key insights into the molecular and neural components of feeding behavior and body weight regulation. An important challenge lies in understanding how the rewarding properties of food interact with, and can override, physiological satiety signals and promote overeating. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain responses in two human patients with congenital leptin deficiency who were shown images of food before and after 7 days of leptin replacement therapy. Leptin was found to modulate neural activation in key striatal regions, suggesting that the hormone acts on neural circuits governing food intake to diminish the perception of food reward while enhancing the response to satiety signals generated during food consumption.

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Fig. 1

Fig. 1

Leptin regulates brain responses to food images. (A). Leptin reduces activation in the nucleus accumbens-caudate and putamen–globus pallidus regions in subject 1 (S1) and subject 2 (S2) (linear regression coefficients; mean ± SE). Visual cortex showed no response to leptin. (B) Nucleus accumbens-caudate and (C) putamen–globus pallidus are activated by food stimuli (threshold P < 0.05; corrected for multiple comparisons). (D) A three-way interaction between stimulus (food versus nonfood images), fasted or fed state, and leptin localized to nucleus accumbens-caudate (fig. S1A). Mean corrected activity from this region (y axis) is plotted against the ranked liking for foods. Each block comprised five foods; mean liking ratings for each block were ranked and plotted against nucleus accumbens-caudate activity for that block in the fasted (black) and fed (gray) states, pre- and postleptin. Before leptin treatment, activation in nucleus accumbens-caudate correlated positively with liking in both fasted (P < 0.05) and fed (P < 0.05) states. After leptin treatment, activation correlated with liking ratings only in the fasted state (P < 0.05).

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