0 a hormone (= a chemical made in the body) that controls feelings of hunger and the way the body stores fat:
The identification of the hormone leptin transformed obesity research.
Researchers isolated a natural hormone they called leptin, which tells the brain that the body has enough fatty tissue.
While adding leptin to obese mice made them slimmer, it hasn't worked very well in humans.
People who routinely slept five hours a night had a higher level of ghrelin and a lower level of leptin than those who slept eight hours.
Therefore, agerelated leptin resistance may be caused by increased adiposity or prolonged exposure to the elevated leptin, or both.
A subsequent unpublished analysis demonstrated that leptin peptide decreased with age in the same mice.
Evidence that the diabetes gene encodes the leptin receptor : identification of a mutation in the leptin receptor gene in db/db mice.
Central administration of leptin inhibits food intake and activates the sympathetic nervous system in rhesus macaques.
Thus circulating leptin appears to increase until late middle age, then, as in rodents, begins to decrease with advanced old age.
