Scintillon Institute researchers uncover an evolutionarily conserved brain region that puts a “brake” on food intake which may advance therapeutics for obesity and related disorders with excessive eating such as Prader-Willi syndrome.

Do you ever wonder why you stop eating even when there are appealing foods available?

The cerebellum compares hunger state with after-eating nutritional status in the gut to regulate dopamine reward signals in the striatum to control meal size. click here for higher-res image credit: Aloysius Y. T. Low

A multi-institution collaboration led by Associate Professor Albert I. Chen at the Scintillon Institute, Assistant Professor J. Nicholas Betley and Postdoctoral Fellow Aloysius Low at the University of Pennsylvania searched for brain regions that might provide a stop signal for feeding and identified the cerebellum, a brain region outside of the conventional feeding network, as an important regulator of meal size. Neural activity of this region directs the suppression of food intake in mice, and this activity is abolished in human subjects with insatiable appetite. Their findings were published in the journal Nature on November 17, 2021.