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| health > diet & fitness > story page |         |
New hormone may help treat obesityAugust 30, 1999Web posted at: 5:02 p.m. EDT (2102 GMT)
By Laura Lane (WebMD) -- The fat mice have done it again: They rapidly lost weight after receiving injections of a hormone produced by the brain, a new study suggests. This isn't the first time researchers have reported results that could lead to a new medication to treat obesity. But these scientists, who published their findings in this week's international journal Nature Medicine, are saying that this time the approach is different. In addition to curbing appetites, the hormone, called alpha-MSH, may encourage the body to store less fat, says co-principal investigator Dr. Ute Hochgeschwender of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation in Oklahoma City. She says that the finding could lead to a better obesity medication, because alpha-MSH may actually help the body to store less fat. The highly touted hormone leptin goes only part of the way in treating obesity, because the hormone works solely by curbing appetite.
More than one-half of adults in the country are either overweight or obese, according to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. These Americans are at greater risk for developing a host of diseases, including diabetes, heart disease, stroke and certain cancers. People with a body mass index (measure of weight relative to height) of 25 to 29.9 are overweight. A body mass index of 30 or more indicates obesity. While health experts emphasize that improved diets and increased physical activity could solve the problem of obesity in this country, scientists also acknowledge that genetics play a large part in the development of obesity. In a 1998 issue of the international journal Nature Genetics, German scientists reported finding two obese children who were deficient in alpha-MSH because they lacked the gene that holds the blueprint for producing the hormone, Hochgeschwender said. Though the genetic deficiency is extremely rare, the finding reveals another clue to the complex way that the body and its genes regulate weight. With her collaborator Miles Brennan of Eleanor Roosevelt Institute in Denver, an independent medical-research facility, Hochgeschwender bred mice lacking the gene that gives rise to alpha-MSH. At 4 months old, the mutant mice were almost twice as heavy as the normal mice who were born in the same litter, the results showed. However, once the researchers gave the mutant mice daily injections of alpha-MSH, the mice lost almost 50 percent of the excess weight within two weeks. When the researchers stopped the injections, the mutant mice not only regained the weight but also returned to eating significantly more food, as they had before the injections, said the Oklahoma researcher. The results also showed that when the mice ate a high-fat diet, the mutant mice not only gained more weight but also had a greater appetite than when they ate a diet with less fat. Normal mice on a high-fat diet tended to eat less food and gained less weight. Responding to the fat in the diet, alpha-MSH decreased the appetite of the normal mice and encouraged their bodies to store less fat, Hochgeschwender said. Without the hormone, the mutant mice couldn't control their appetites or the amount of fat they were storing. But the study didn't provide solid evidence of alpha-MSH's ability to regulate fat storage, said Dr. Greg Barsh, an associate professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, who wrote an editorial to accompany the research article. The main way the hormone operates is by influencing appetite. "It's possible that there's a small effect on fat storage, but that really has yet to be shown," he said. Alpha-MSH also is responsible for a number of other bodily functions, including influencing skin and hair color, Barsh added. So developing the hormone for pharmaceutical use could be very challenging, because scientists would have to create a medication that would exclusively interact with the brain, fat cells and other body parts involved with weight and appetite regulation. Nevertheless, the investigators said they hope to find a "strategic partner" to support a clinical trial, which would test the effectiveness of alpha-MSH in obese people. Brennan said his research institute has been approached by a few large pharmaceutical firms but declined to specify.
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