Periodic Reporting for period 3 - ReCoDE (Reshaping cortical circuits to decrease binge eating)
Période du rapport: 2022-07-01 au 2023-12-31
This project aims to understand how stress affects pathways in the brain to promote strong intake of tasty food in a short period of time (binge eating). The project has 3 aims:
1. Determine the longer-term changes in brain pathways caused by stress.
2. Unravel the immediate changes in these pathways in response to stress and during binge eating.
3. Assess whether the stress changes in these pathway are responsible for stress eating.
Overall, this project seeks to find ways to address how stress eating is orchestrated by dysfunction brain pathways. This can have relevance for people suffering from weight problems and eating disorders.
Among those are pathways that promote food intake and others that brake food intake. We have found that a brain region that exerts cognitive control (cortex) is in direct connection with various cell types in another brain region (hypothalamus) with an important role in food intake.
We have found that the connection between those regions is strong, and that within it there are actual multiple parallel connections, some to neurons that are known to promote food intake and others to neurons known to reduce food intake.
We have found that stimulating this overall connection, depending on the exact stimulation parameters chosen, can increase food intake.
Moreover, we have found that stress (known to increase appetite for food, particularly palatable subtypes) alters the strength of connections in these pathways.
In particular stress weakens connection strength in the pathway linked to 'reducing food intake'. Further investigations into this process are ongoing.