Optogenetic and chemogenetic insights into the food addiction hypothesis

Obesity is clinically diagnosed by a simple formula based on the weight and height of a person (body mass index), but is associated with a host of other behavioral symptoms that are likely neurological in origin. In recent years, many scientists have asked whether similar behavioral and cognitive changes occur in drug addiction and obesity, lending many to discuss the potential for “food addiction”. Advances in understanding the circuitry underlying both feeding behaviors and drug addiction may allow us to consider this question from the viewpoint of neural circuits, to complement behavioral perspectives. Here, we review advances in understanding of these circuits and use them to consider whether drawing comparisons to drug addiction is helpful for understanding certain forms of obesity.

• Publication year

  2014

• Venue

  Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience

• Publication date

  2014-02-28

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.3389/fnbeh.2014.00057PMID 24616674PMCID 3937547
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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