RADFORD – Radford University biology professor Mark Cline and his students Wint Nander, Brian Prall and Christie Bowden have discovered that a known hormone only found in fat cells of obese people, called visfatin, stimulates appetite.

Their findings have been accepted for publication in the journal Behavioral Brain Research.

Visfatin was documented in a 2005 edition of the journal Science.  Only obese humans secrete visfatin from fat cells around their torso.  Thin people do not secrete visfatin.

Cline and his students took the known findings a step further and injected visfatin into a bird’s brain to see if it affected the bird’s appetite.  They found that this hormone made the bird eat considerably more feed and activated the region of the brain that regulates hunger.

This is the first finding of the effects of visfatin on appetite, and may lead to a pharmacological strategy to treat obesity in a range of species, including humans.

“As the rate of obesity increases in our country at an alarming rate, the need to understand what naturally regulates hunger and our feeling of fullness becomes critical,” says Cline.  “Many scientists use rodents in their research, but we use birds as a model to provide new insight into the regulation of appetite.  We are very excited by this finding since visfatin is only found in the obese and since only a handful of hormones cause hunger, whereas most that regulate appetite decrease it,” says Cline.

To learn more, contact Ann Hillenbrand at (540) 831-7749 or ahillenb@radford.edu