Abstract
Eating disorder is one of the intractable diseases, and the pathology is incompletely understood. Comparing to other organic illness, an appropriate animal disease model is non-existent. For that reason, there is an obstacle to elucidate the pathogenesis of eating disorder and the development of its treatment due to the difficulty in extrapolating the results of animal experiment to human beings. At present, the pathogenesis of eating disorder is considered to be a complex of abnormalities at the whole-body level with environmental and genetic factors, such as 1) cognition in the upper central nervous system, 2) feeding regulation in the hypothalamus that peptides play a pivotal role, 3) sensibility of feeding-regulatory peptide receptors, 4) feeding-regulatory signal transduction pathway from periphery, and 5) the level of feeding-regulatory signal from periphery that peptides play a pivotal role. Abnormalities in blood concentration of feeding-regulatory peptides have been reported in eating disorder. We present the current states and the future possibilities of researches focused on peripheral feeding-regulatory peptides regarding elucidation of the pathology of eating disorder, especially anorexia nervosa, and the development of its treatment.
