A new study from Imperial College London has taken the usual research one step further and successfully found a way to target specific thyroid hormones in the brain and manipulate appetite in mouse subjects with no side effects.

The research focused on thyroid hormones, as they are widely known to have a major role in regulating appetite. The problem previously faced by researchers has been the wide dispersal of thyroid hormone receptors (TRs) throughout the body. As thyroid hormones regulate a multitude of things in the body, a highly targeted method needed to be developed to specifically tackle the appetite mechanism.

The team looked at how they could specifically disable the activity of thyroid hormone receptors in the hypothalamus, a known appetite-regulating area of the brain.