Ghrelin mimics fasting to enhance human hedonic, orbitofrontal cortex, and hippocampal responses to food

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Ghrelin in this randomized controlled trial publication.

The researchers investigated whether ghrelin administration (exogenous hyperghrelinemia) mimics effects of fasting (endogenous hyperghrelinemia) on the hedonic response and activation of brain-reward systems to food.

Why It Was Studied

Therefore, changes in plasma ghrelin might mediate counter-regulatory responses to a negative energy balance through changes in food hedonics.

Who Took Part

The abstract describes 17 men taking part.

PubMed indexes the participants as young adults and adults, men only.

One male subject was excluded from the fMRI analysis because of excess head motion, which left 21 subjects with brain-activation data.

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized, double-blind, single-blind and crossover.

Because people in this Ghrelin study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

Neither the men nor the staff measuring them knew who was on Ghrelin, so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

Only one side, usually the men, was kept unaware of whether Ghrelin was given.

In the crossover set-up each of the men took both Ghrelin and the comparison in turn, acting as their own control.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Abdomen, Acylation, Appetite Regulation, Breakfast, Fasting, Food and Food Preferences.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and single-blind study of Ghrelin in 17 men.

With fewer than 40 people, it is a small study, so it is better read as an early signal for further research than as a settled answer.

Results are reported in around 6 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2014 (The American journal of clinical nutrition), a journal based in United States.

More context: the Ghrelin compound page, all human trials.