Get to Know Your Hypothalamus
The remarkable advances of the last few years in understanding and responding to obesity all comes from insight into a place in your brain that’s about the size of an almond. It is your hypothalamus. In Nature last week, researchers from Cambridge and the Max Planck Institute published a detailed map of the human hypothalamus. They call it HYPOMAP.
This map will be hugely important for advancing obesity research and care because it gives scientists a map of circuits that control appetite, metabolism, sleep, and stress responses. This map goes far beyond anything scientists have had before because it is specific to the human hypothalamus. It allows them to understand critical differences between the hypothalamus of a human and a mouse.
That matters because much of the basic research on obesity is done in mice.
A “Goldmine” for Obesity Research
The senior editor of Nature, David Rowland, praises the importance of this work:
“The hypothalamus is a functionally diverse structure with many subregions. These functions include controlling states of hunger and satiety, making it important for obesity research. Here, the authors generate a massive transcriptomic atlas of the human hypothalamus that includes spatial data. The resource is a goldmine for researchers wanting to selectively target specific populations of neurons in the hypothalamus.”
Giles Yeo, senior author of this research, makes it clear that this is not just a milestone in obesity research, it is a starting place for more revolutionary advances:
“HYPOMAP is not meant to be a static atlas, but rather a framework to be built on by ourselves and the rest of the community, hopefully leading to further scientific revolutions.”
What It Means for All of Us
This is not just arcane knowledge with meaning only for neuroscientists. It has a very important message for each of us. Your body weight and your energy balance are products of how your hypothalamus functions. We can take good care of our bodies, but if that little thermostat is not working right, all the willpower, strength of character, and good behavior in the world will not fix it. Genuine clinical obesity is a medical problem that requires good medical care. The answers lie in your hypothalamus.
Click here for the paper in Nature, here, here, and here for more on its significance.
The Human Hypothalamus, image from BodyParts3D and the Database Center for Life Science, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.1 JP
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February 10, 2025
