Amylin May Offer (More) Help to Treat Postmenopausal Obesity

Extract

The modern world faces an exploding obesity epidemic, and despite many years of intensive research, the current clinically available nonsurgical treatment strategies are rather unsuccessful and drugs that were expected to alleviate the obesity problem had to be withdrawn from the market. Hence, understanding the physiological controls of eating has never been more important; this understanding may potentially help to develop effective pharmacological tools that reduce eating and eventually body weight without unacceptable side effects. Obesity research has to a large extent been focused on central nervous system neurotransmitters and also on long-term adiposity signals; the controls of individual meals were less in that focus, but it is now recognized that adiposity signals influence eating by modulating the effect of meal size controls (e.g. Refs. 1 and 2). The effects of adiposity signals and meal size controls appear to exhibit sex differences, and at least in females, estradiol appears to be the major factor that is involved in the control of eating, mainly by modulating meal size controls (3–6).