Hunger Pain

1 Pages 264 Words

Over the years, scientists have proposed many hunger signals. Some researchers
argued that the contracting stomach provides the trigger. One investigator went
so far as to swallow a balloon and inflate it. This dulled his appetite all
right, but other researchers countered that people who had had their stomachs
surgically removed still became hungry. Biologists have also debated whether a
dip in the blood's sugar concentration initiates desire for a meal.
Two years ago, scientists found that when they gave a hormone called ghrelin to
rodents, it stimulated feeding. Last year, Cummings' team showed that the
concentration of ghrelin in a person's blood rises significantly before meals
and plummets afterwards. And in one of the latest studies, investigators
observed that people receiving premeal infusions of the hormone increased their
food intake by an average of 30 percent. Although scientists only identified
ghrelin in 1999, more than 100 papers on the substance have already been
published. The reasons for the interest are obvious. If ghrelin is a safe
appetite stimulant, the hormone could lead to treatments for wasting syndromes
stemming from AIDS, cancer, heart disease, and a variety of other causes. And
perhaps of greater interest to the overall U.S. population, in which obesity has
become epidemic, ghrelin could become the basis for treatments that suppress
appetite and provide a novel way to encourage weight loss.
Excited by this discovery, some researchers speculated that extra leptin could
trick the body into thinking that it didn't need to eat much. A biotech company
even paid $25 million for the patent rights to leptin. It's turned out, however,
that obese people make abnormally high amounts of the hormone and that providing
them with more leptin doesn't instigate significant weight loss....