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The team has discovered a gene that triggers a feeling of fullness, as well as the need to sleep after eating. A similar gene is found in people, opening up the potential to develop a drug that could help control obesity by reducing appetite and increasing the desire for exercise. The team, led by Associate Professor Roger Pocock at the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute and his colleagues at the University of Copenhagan, published their results today in the  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , a prestigious US journal. Associate Professor Pocock and his team discovered a gene, encoding a transcription factor called ETS-5, which controls signals from the brain to the intestines. Associate Professor Pocock explained that when the intestine had stored enough fat, the brain would receive the message to stop moving, effectively putting the worm to sleep. "When animals are malnourished they seek out food by roaming their environment. When they're well fed...

"People vary in their distribution of body fat -- some put fat in their belly, which we call abdominal adiposity, and some in their hips and thighs," says Sekar Kathiresan, MD, director of the MGH Center for Genomic Medicine, associate professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and senior author of the  JAMA  report. "Abdominal adiposity has been correlated with cardiometabolic disease, but whether it actually has a role in causing those conditions was unknown. We tested whether genetic predisposition to abdominal adiposity was associated with the risk for type 2 diabetes and coronary heart disease and found that the answer was a firm 'yes'." While several observational studies have reported greater incidence of type 2 diabetes and heart disease among individuals with abdominal adiposity, they could not rule out the possibility that lifestyle factors -- such as diet, smoking and a lack of exercise -- were the actual causes of increased disease ris...