Heady Influence — What is the function and disease relevance of the adult neural stem cells found in the mouse hypothalamus? In a study published in October 2012 in Nature Cell Biology, Einstein researchers led by Dr. Dongsheng Cai showed that these stem cells help to centrally regulate metabolic physiology and that their dysregulation resulted in weight and glucose disorders that can cause type 2 diabetes. The researchers put mice on a long-term high-fat diet and observed that levels of hypothalamic neural stem cells became drastically depleted and that the neuronal differentiation of the stem cells was severely impaired. They found that the high fat diet’s neurodegenerative action was caused by activation of the proinflammatory pathway involving IκB kinase B (IKKB) and the downstream nuclear factor-κB (NF-κB), leading to obesity and pre-diabetes. Dr. Cai is professor of molecular pharmacology. Other Einstein authors on the paper were Juxue Li and Yizhe Tang.
Posted on: Tuesday, October 30, 2012