Commentary Cellscience Reviews Vol.3 No.1 ISSN 1742-8130

Hunger and Memory: Can Ghrelin Help Us Remember Where to Find Dinner?

There are few things more important to the evolutionary survival of a species than its capacity to acquire food. The ability to learn and remember the location of food stores helps animals survive times when nutrients are scarce. Thus, effective learning and memory are particularly important during periods of food shortage, when animals are hungry. The regulation of food intake, body weight, and adiposity involves complex neural circuits that are influenced by multiple peripheral hormones. One of these, ghrelin, is a gastrointestinal peptide that powerfully increases food intake in humans and many other species. Circulating levels rise sharply before individual meals, consistent with a role in meal initiation. Ghrelin levels also rise in response to weight loss, suggesting an additional role in long-term body weight regulation. In a recent issue of Nature Neuroscience, Diano et al report that ghrelin may play a key role in connecting hunger and memory¹. Ghrelin injections into the rodent brain increased not only food intake, but also neurobiological markers of memory formation and performance on behavioral memory tasks. Conversely, ghrelin knockout mice showed defects in both of these domains.

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