Posts Tagged ‘neuroscience’

Possible Benefits for Brain Function from Obesity Treatment

February 20, 2024 — The potential for benefits to brain function with effective obesity treatment is becoming difficult to miss. In particular, a new observational study of brain function in a cohort of patients receiving metabolic surgery for treatment of obesity is drawing much attention right now in JAMA Network Open. It suggests the possibility of a lasting benefit […]

Is Obesity Causing Us Stress or Is Stress Causing Obesity?

December 31, 2023 — “We have found a way to soothe the pain of living in this society by stimulating the reward pathway with unhealthy foods just as people do with alcohol and drugs.” This blunt obserservation landed in our inbox with a thud from obesity scientist and clinician Caroline Apovian last week. A counterbalance to the optimistic talk […]

How Do GLP-1 Agonists Help with Inflammation?

December 19, 2023 — For some time now, scientists have noted that GLP-1 agonists have effects on more than just blood sugar and body weight. They seem to have an effect on systemic inflammation. For more than a decade, researchers have been exploring their anti-inflammatory effects. But a key question has remained: exactly how do GLP-1 agonists help with […]

Taming Problematic Desires for Alcohol as Well as Food

July 11, 2023 — The emergence of advanced medicines for obesity is teaching us a lot about the overlapping mechanisms that drive desires for alcohol, food, and more. Desire, it seems, is more than just a feeling. It is the product of biological processes that our bodies regulate. But those processes can clearly go astray, and desire for food, […]

Impaired Analyses and Overreaching Claims

June 19, 2023 — An appealing narrative is seductive. Recently, we tripped over a case study in this basic fact when a new study in Nature Metabolism stirred up considerable attention from health reporters with claims about “severely impaired” brain responses to nutrients in humans with obesity. But in retrospect, there’s an plausible argument that the analyses were impaired […]

What? Obesity Is a Disease of the Brain?

June 13, 2023 — We are in the midst of a great deal of cognitive dissonance about obesity. Part of the boilerplate description is that it is simply a dietary disease. But recent scientific and therapeutic advances tell a different story – that obesity is just as much a disease of altered brain function as it is a dietary […]

Coming to Terms with the Biology of Desire

June 5, 2023 — O‌‌ne of the neat tricks of semaglutide and tirzepatide is their unexpected ability to shift the frames of bias through which we look at obesity and human behavior. Neuroscience and behavioral psychology have long told us the human desire for food is not purely a matter of choice. Yet in addressing obesity, weight bias and […]

Might Semaglutide Prompt Less Alcohol Use?

March 8, 2023 — We would classify this as a report of a side effect. But it’s not really an adverse event. It seems that for some people, the use of semaglutide has prompted less alcohol use. In the New York Times, Dani Blum describes the experience of one patient: “In August 2022, Eva Monsen’s endocrinologist prescribed Ozempic [semaglutide] […]

Can Deep Brain Stimulation Stop Binge Eating?

November 14, 2022 — Two patients. This fits our definition of a small pilot study and Nature Medicine published it recently. In this study, Rajat Shivacharan and colleagues treated binge eating disorder and severe obesity in two patients, using responsive deep brain stimulation. It involves the placement of tiny electrodes in the brain, connected to a pulse generator implanted […]

Obesity Causes: Physiology, Genes, and Signals

October 18, 2022 — Yesterday was the first of three days exploring the best scientific thinking in the world on the causes of obesity. From the start, it was plain that obesity presents a puzzle. Physiology, genes, and signals regulate the storage of energy in adipose tissue and thus obesity. But one thing was clear after 12 scientists through […]