Scientists have achieved a breakthrough in stopping stressed people from gaining weight. Researchers at the Georgetown University Medical Center, the United States, have discovered, in experiments conducted on laboratory animals, that blocking the pathway that leads stressed people to gain weight is the key to manipulating fat.

The findings, published online in Nature Medicine, explain why people who are chronically stressed often develop ‘metabolic syndrome’ – a condition that causes individuals to gain more weight than they should based on the calories they consume.

In all, 60 million Americans were estimated to be affected by the metabolic syndrome in 2000, according to a study funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2004.

The pathway in question involves two players – a neurotransmitter (neuropeptide Y, or NPY) and the receptor (neuropeptide Y2 receptor, or Y2R), which activate in two types of cells in the fat tissue: endothelial cells lining blood vessels and fat cells themselves.

The researchers found that both NPY and Y2R are activated during stress, leading to apple-shape obesity and metabolic syndrome.

With this understanding, researchers were able to add fat selectively to the mice by injecting NPY into a specific area. They were also able to block weight gain and metabolic syndrome by injecting the mice with Y2R blocker into the abdominal fat.

According to Zofia Zukowska, professor and chairman of the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at Georgetown University Medical Center and the study’s senior author, the different experiments conducted over four years demonstrated that a similar mechanism exist in monkeys as well.

It was found that stressed versus non-stressed animals ate the same amount of food, but the stressed animals processed it differently. The novel finding is that NPY works on fat tissue, not in the brain.

Zukowska said that these findings might eventually lead to control of the metabolic syndrome, which is a huge health problem for many Americans.

An accumulation of chronic stressors, Zukowska said, like disagreements with your boss, taking care of a chronically ill child, or repeated traffic road rages, could be acting as an amplifier to a hypercaloric diet when prolonged over a period of time. Depression may also be acting as a stressor.

The metabolic syndrome carries risk factors like increasing a patient’s chances of developing heart disease, stroke, and diabetes.

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