Hypothalamic homeostatic and forebrain reward-related genes were examined in the context of scheduled meal feeding without caloric restriction in C57BL/6 mice. Mice fed ad libitum but allowed access to a palatable high-fat (HF) diet for 2 hours a day rapidly adapted their feeding behaviour and consumed approximately 80% of their daily caloric intake during this 2-hour scheduled feed. Gene expre...

Leptin has been shown to exert positive effects during the maturation of bovine oocytes, influencing blastocyst development, apoptosis, and the transcript levels of developmentally important genes. The present study was conducted to characterize further the mechanisms of leptin action on oocytes and the role of cumulus cells (CCs) in this context. In the first series of experiments, cumulus-ooc...

A poor prenatal environment brings about perturbations in leptin surge and hypothalamic circuitry that program impaired ability to regulate energy homeostasis in adulthood. Here, using a rat model of moderate maternal caloric restriction during gestation, we aimed to investigate whether leptin supplementation with physiological doses throughout lactation is able to ameliorate the adverse develo...

Seasonal Siberian hamsters lose fat reserves, decrease body weight and leptin concentrations, and suppress reproduction on short-day photoperiod (SD). Chronic leptin infusion at physiological doses caused body weight and fat loss in SD animals but was ineffective in long-day (LD) hamsters. Using ovariectomized estrogen-treated females, we tested the hypothesis that responsiveness to leptin is r...

Leptin, a product of both adipose tissue and the placental syncytiotrophoblast and a potential regulator of primate conceptus development, increases in the maternal circulation with advancing gestation. This increase may be potentiated by estrogens, which also increase as pregnancy progresses. In the present study adipose tissue was collected from nonpregnant (n = 5) baboons (Papio sp) and in b...

osteoporosis is a systemic skeletal disease and there is a close relationship between the sympathetic nervous system (sns) and bone metabolism. leptin has been shown to regulate bone formation and bone resorption via the sns. however, the effect of sns on leptin signaling has not been clearly understood. in the present study, we studied the effect of propranolol on ovariectomy-induced osteoporo...

Five allelic mutants of the diabetes (db) gene have been previously described in mice and rats causing obesity, infertility, and varying degrees of diabetes. We have identified a new, spontaneous mutation resulting in obesity and diabetes in a colony of CD-1 outbred mice, Mus musculus domesticus. Genetic complementation studies indicated that the new mutation was an allele of the diabetes locus...

Vagal CCK-A receptors (CCKARs) and leptin receptors (LRbs) interact synergistically to mediate short-term satiety. Cocaine- and amphetamine-regulated transcript (CART) peptide is expressed by vagal afferent neurons. We sought to demonstrate that this neurotransmitter regulates CCK and leptin actions on short-term satiety. We also examined the signal transduction pathways responsible for mediati...

One of the five possible mechanisms of leptin resistance in human obesity is the defect in the leptin receptor (Ob-R). Evidence has accumulated that leptin-binding activity in human serum is related to a soluble form of the leptin receptor, and restriction of energy intake resulted a decrease in circulating leptin levels. Aim of this study is to examine the difference of serum soluble leptin re...

CONTEXT Complications of atherosclerosis are the leading cause of morbidity and mortality in industrialized societies. Obesity has emerged as an independent risk factor for complications of atherosclerotic vascular disease. Leptin, a hormone produced by the adipocyte, increases with obesity and appears to modulate energy balance and food intake. In addition, other actions of leptin have been pr...