Future weight-loss therapies could centre around peptides that target blood vessels in fat and send them to programmed cell death (termed apoptosis), say University of Cincinnati (UC) researchers.
A research team led by Randy Seeley, PhD, of UC's Metabolic Diseases Institute, has found that obese animal models treated with proapoptotic peptide experienced decreased food intake and significant fat loss.The study was published online ahead of print Jan. 26, 2010, in Diabetes, the official journal of the American Diabetes Association.
Growth of fat tissue is highly dependent on the tissue's ability to build new blood vessels -- a phenomenon called angiogenesis.
Inhibiting adipose angiogenesis -- essentially "starving" fat tissue can reverse the effects of a high-fat diet in mice and rats, says Seeley.
"The body is extremely efficient at controlling energy balance," says Seeley, a professor in UC's internal medicine department and recipient of the 2009 Outstanding Scientific Achievement Award from the American Diabetes Association.
"Think of fat tissue like a bathtub," he says. "To keep the amount of water the same, you have to make sure that the speed of the water coming in and the water going out match. If the water is coming in faster than the water is going out, eventually you have to build a bigger bathtub.
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"What we found is that if we can target these fat tissue blood vessels, animals eat less and lose weight as their 'bathtubs' get smaller."
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Seeley's team found that fat loss was occurring without major changes to energy expenditure, but with reduced food intake. The authors noted that there were no signs of illness with this treatment and results were independent of the actions of the appetite-controlling hormone leptin.
"These experiments indicate that there is a novel system that informs our brains about the size of our fat tissue 'bathtubs' and can influence how much we eat," says Seeley. "The findings highlight the ability to provide new therapeutic strategies for obesity based on these dynamics of blood vessels in our fat tissue." The next step, Seeley says, is to figure out the important signals that come from fat that cause the weight loss.
Source-Medindia
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