| > Let me confidently assure you that inflammation in the hypothalamus is a dominant feature of obesity 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? |
Pardon my passionate writing, obesity is a personal matter for me. I'm looking forward to it being pushed further out of the lab and into the clinic, but I'm not sure what those steps look like just yet.