Researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have made
a discovery in neuroscience that could offer a long-lasting solution to eating
disorders such as obesity.
It was previously thought that the nerve cells in the brain
associated with appetite regulation were generated entirely during an embryo’s
development in the womb and therefore their numbers were fixed for life.
But research published today in the Journal of Neuroscience
has identified a population of stem cells capable of generating new
appetite-regulating neurons in the brains of young and adult rodents.