People with a rare genetic disorder known as Prader-Willi syndrome never feel full, and this insatiable hunger can lead to life-threatening obesity. Scientists studying the problem have now found that the fist-shaped structure known as the cerebellum—which had not previously been linked to hunger—is key to regulating satiation in those with this condition.
This finding is the latest in a series of discoveries revealing that the cerebellum, long thought to be primarily involved in motor coordination, also plays a broad role in cognition, emotion and behavior.
“We’ve opened up a whole field of cerebellar control of food intake,” says Albert Chen, a neuroscientist at the Scintillon Institute in California.
For years neuroscientists studying appetite focused mainly either on the hypothalamus, a brain area involved in regulating energy balance, or on reward-processing centers such as the nucleus accumbens.
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But this group has identified a novel feeding center in the brain, says Elanor Hinton, a neuroscientist at the University of Bristol in England who was not involved with the study.
“I’ve been working in appetite research for the past 15 years or so, and the cerebellum has just not been a target,” Hinton says. “I think this is going to be important both for Prader-Willi syndrome and, much more widely, to address obesity in the general population.”
