Proopiomelanocortin control of food intake

VIVIANA F. BUMASCHNY

Buenos Aires

Simposio; 2nd Federation of Latin American and Caribbean Neuroscience Societies (FALAN) Congress-The ISN Symposium on Neural Control of Appetite From genes to circuits and behavior; 2016

Federation of Latin American and Caribbean Neuroscience Societies (FALAN)

The global obesity epidemic has reached over 600 million people. Obesity predisposes to cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes mellitus by central and peripheral mechanisms, causing metabolic syndrome, which increases the risk of mortality. Despite great effort is made to develop new therapies, a major difficulty associated to obesity treatments, is that patients initially lose weight but they later experience a rebound. In this talk we will discuss emerging evidence, collected from genetically engineered mice, revealing that the plasticity of energy balance neural circuits is lost in overweighted animals, preventing them to achieve a normal body weight after treatment. We will focus on the subpopulation of hypothalamic GABAergic Proopiomelanocortin (POMC) neurons, which we found that play a critical role in the control of food intake and glucose homeostasis.