Appetite brake of nicotine unraveled

The tobacco is, the excess weight is: This has been seen many people who have stopped smoking. Now, researchers have found in experiments with mice, such as nicotine inhibits the appetite - and hope for new weapons against obesity.

Cigarettes cause disease, but also slim. No sooner have the ex-smokers banished the fags out of their lives, they get it to do with weight gain. On average they lay by 4.5 kilograms. Now U.S. researchers have found a mechanism that curbs the appetite by nicotine.
Actually, the team had studied at Marina Picciotto from Yale University in New Haven (Conn.), a potential drug to treat depression. They found that mice ate less when they got the remedy. The researchers came up with the cause of the appetite-suppressing effects of nicotine: activates the nerve poison, just as the depression drug, a number of receptors in a brain region called the hypothalamus. They signal the body seems to be that he got enough food, the researchers write in the journal Science.

The corresponding nerve cells are called POMC cells. They are not identical with the receptors that influence the desire for nicotine. In mice that did not have the POMC complex, have not worked the nicotine appetite suppressant, the researchers said: The rodents were in the experiment did not become leaner, even if they received nicotine.

Hope for new drugs

The scientists could even make claims to the precise receptor arrest, which is responsible for the effect: a subtype called alpha-3-beta-4. When nicotine was docked to it, whether the POMC neurons were activated and would have slowed the appetite of rodents.
However, the effect on the nerve cells is probably not solely responsible for ensuring that smokers have a lower average body mass index as a Non smoking. The effect of nicotine on the metabolism of a person is held responsible for that increase smokers when they stop smoking.

Picciotto hopes, however, that the findings lead to new drugs for people who want to keep their weight or decrease. "Many people say that they do not stop to smoke because they would then increase," said the professor of Psychiatry. The new results showed that it might be possible to achieve the appetite-suppressing effects of nicotine addiction without risk.

Mariella De Biasi, a member of the research team considers that the study therefore not only for future Non smoking as significant: "The results give us a target for developing drugs that could help control obesity and other metabolic disorders."