| Hi, Endocrinologist and obesity specialist here. Let me confidently assure you that inflammation in the hypothalamus is a dominant feature of obesity, and obesity is currently one of the top diagnosed medical problems in America. This stuff isn't hypothetical, but well accepted within the clinical research field for metabolic disorders. Please don't recommend laymen avoid reading articles like this. That's rather senseless. While this stuff hasn't become standard in medical school curricula yet, it definitely will be some day, particularly when we are more confident in interventions that prevent hypothalamic gliosis. EDIT: also, don't discount hypothalamic inflammation based on what you know about encephalitis. Some parts of the hypothalamus (the arcuate nucleus, in particular) are highly susceptible to inflammation because they are surrounded by a characteristically porous part of the blood brain barrier (behind the hypophyseal portal system). This allows bulky blood-born protein hormones (like leptin and insulin) to make it into the sensory neurons. Indeed this part of the brain doesn't become red and painful, but something more relevant happens. Microglia surround the neurons responsible for appetite suppression and kill them off, which permanently changes the body fat setpoint that the brain strongly defends. There is definitely a profound and sometimes irreversible loss of function here, and that's the current focus in research. Hopefully some day we will find ways to drive repair of these circuits. |
I certainly believe you (I'm not qualified to agree or disagree, as I'm not a specialist like you). The point of my rambling comment is to make sure the readers understand that the kind of inflammation we're talking about here is very removed from what people usually think about when they think of inflammation.
> Please don't recommend laymen avoid reading articles like this. That's rather senseless
Hm... Here I'll have to disagree. I think medical research should be consumed rather judiciously, especially by laymen or by doctors that are not specialists in the research area in question.
I'd rather have people read distilled accounts of research (textbooks, meta-analysis, etc.) than studies in knockout mice.
EDIT: Answering your edit. I'm not discounting anything. I think the study is as relevant as it gets for a study in mice, and the role of hydrocarbons of the diet is an important one. After all, is it just calories in VS calories out or is there something else?
I do understand what the study is talking about when it talks about microglia and inflammation. I'm merely trying to answer the question about "What is inflammation IRL" in a way that laymen may understand - most people don't know that microglia are derived from cells of the immune system (in a sense, they are the "inflammatory cells" of the brain), and can't draw the parallel between neutrophils and monocytes happily blasting away through the extra celular matrix under the skin in search for pathogens and microglia killing healthy neurons.
In no way I want to be skeptical of the article or discount the importance of its findings. I only want to draw the distinction between the "naïve" idea of inflammation and the kind of inflammation the article is talking about.
EDIT2: The poster asked why he didn't feel "inflammed". He would certainly feel "inflammed" if he had an encephalities, so there is definitely some confusion here. My comparison between this "low level" inflammation and encephalites was meant to highlight that. Do you think I was unclear?