Difficulty losing weight is not necessarily due to "weak willpower"! Authoritative journal confirms: "Brain damage" may make obese people unable to control their mouths
Frequent failure to lose weight is not necessarily due to lack of willpower? Study: Obesity is linked to damaged connections between “these two” parts of the brain
The root cause of frequent failure to lose weight is actually not “the inability to control the mouth”, but the fact that the brain is damaged and the appetite cannot be satisfied? A recent study published in the authoritative scientific journal “Nature” stated that the weakening or interruption of the connection between two places in the brain is significantly related to the increase in the body mass index (BMI) of the subjects, especially for those suffering from bulimia and eating disorders. For patients, the correlation is even more significant.
The study was initiated by the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. The research team believes that the production process of “appetite” is mostly controlled by the integration of sensory, interoceptive and hormonal signals in the brain. If the signal integration process is imbalanced, it can easily lead to unhealthy eating behaviors (such as overeating). Among them, two brain areas: the lateral hypothalamus (LH) and the hippocampus play a crucial role.
The hippocampus is located in the area of the brain that processes memory; the lateral hypothalamus is located in the area of the brain responsible for maintaining the body’s energy balance. Previous animal studies have shown that a “subpopulation of hippocampal neurons” responds to food cues and encodes food memories; the projection of the lateral hypothalamus is the core of hippocampal function, and disorders of this circuit can lead to eating disorders. Behavioral disorders.
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In view of this, the research team used high-resolution tractography of the brains of 178 people with eating disorders in the “Human Connectome Project” initiated by the European Union to explore how the connection between the hippocampus and the lateral hypothalamus affects Evidence for eating disorders. The researchers monitored the subjects’ brain activity as expected, then allowed them to eat a sweet treat (a chocolate milkshake) and further observed brain activity.
When subjects expected to ingest sweets, the presence of melanin-concentrating hormone (MCH), an orexigenic neuropeptide, was found in the dorsolateral hippocampus (dlHPC), confirming its connection with the lateral hypothalamus. No such connection was found in other brain regions. The results of the study showed that in obese individuals, hypothalamic-hippocampal damage was proportional to their body mass index; that is, the degree of disruption of this connection was higher in subjects with higher BMI.
“If the connection between the hypothalamus and the hippocampus is completely damaged, it may lead to severe eating disorder behaviors.” Casey H. Halpern, the lead author of the study, said that through this study, it can be found that the hippocampus in the human brain not only dominates “Memory function” is also involved in the process of obesity and eating disorder behaviors; the melanin-concentrating hormone in the lateral hypothalamus projects to the hippocampus, and its connection is also significantly related to appetite promotion.
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Halpern believes that current treatments for obesity or bulimia do not focus on the role of the hippocampus. Therefore, in the future, it is not ruled out that monitoring the activity status of the hippocampus can be used to predict an individual’s risk of obesity or bulimia, because patients with eating disorders have a high probability of damage to the hypothalamus-hippocampus in the brain. Therefore, this discovery may be regarded as a potential treatment measure for obesity.
“The situation of eating disorders and obese people cannot be solved simply by intervention in calorie control and healthy eating. What these people need is not more “willpower”, but a role similar to that of an “electrician” who can be helped through special treatments. Make the right connections inside their brains.”
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An orexigenic subnetwork within the human hippocampus
Penn Medicine Researchers Identify the Link Between Memory and Appetite in the Human Brain to Explain Obesity
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