Childhood Obesity & Child Development

The address reviews brain development in early childhood and the nature of reward, pleasure and associational memory systems including their functional and neurochemical pathways. We demonstrate that the development of obesity in humanscan be biologically determined and therefore amenable to therapeutic interventions. Separately, although patterns of obesity are related to environmental changes, the heritability of obesity is signifi cant. Th us, identical twins who are brought up in diff erent families will usually have similar amounts and distribution of body fat in adult life, bearing little resemblance to the families into which they were adopted. We will discuss the early work of Olds in pleasure centres, the pleasure-satiation pathways and the neurochemistry of satiation or the lack thereof. In addition, the genetics of the drive to eat and its infl uence on the limbic system and hypothalamus will be discussed. Hypothalamic function will be described in the context of the human connectome in an eff ort to determine how defects in neurocircuitry can lead to excess food consumption beyond metabolic need. In particular, hypothalamic neurons – both in isolation and inside their native neural networks – are assessed to explore how they generate their electrical signals, how these signals are communicated to other brain areas, and how they are altered by physiological and pharmacological stimuli. Th erapeutic and interventional strategies including behavioral, physical, and physiological will be discussed.