Endocrine Abstracts

Understanding the physiological control of appetite is crucial to our understanding of obesity and metabolic disease, and may suggest novel targets for anti-obesity drugs. In the last decade our understanding of the mechanisms by which the brain regulates energy homeostasis has improved dramatically, largely due to new techniques in neuroscience including optogenetics and chemogenetics. This talk will summarise our current understanding of the neural circuitry that regulates food intake, and how separate circuits have been identified that appear to regulate food-seeking behaviour and consummatory behaviour, and to mediate the effect of peripheral signals driving meal termination. A better understanding of these systems and new ways of accurately capturing food intake data in humans may suggest novel behavioural and pharmacological approaches to weight management.