Key Points
A study on mice has shown how gut-produced hunger hormones can influence decision-making and drive an animals behaviour...
The researchers said that the findings demonstrate how the hunger hormone can cross the blood-brain barrier and directly impact the brain to drive activity, controlling a circuit in the brain that is likely to be the same or similar in humans...
They also used brain imaging to study activity in the mices ventral hippocampus, which is a decision-making part of the brain understood to help form and use memories to guide behaviour...
The researchers found that activity in a subset of brain cells in the ventral hippocampus increased when the mice approached the food and that this neural activity inhibited them from eating...
The researchers also found that this corresponded to high levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin circulating in the blood.. Further, by activating these ventral hippocampal neurons, the researchers were able to experimentally make mice behave as if they were full and therefore stopped eating...
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