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Dr. Alison Wren, Research Fellow at Imperial College, London has isolated a ?hunger hormone? that dramatically boosts human food consumption. Scientists have known for some time that the hormone stimulates hunger in rats, but they had never been able to identify its effects in humans. Now they have shown that it can make people so ravenous they eat nearly a third more food than usual.

?There is currently little effective medical treatment for obesity and we are very excited to have taken this step toward a future therapy,? Wren says.
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Obesity is surpassing malnutrition as a major health problem in many parts of the world.Weight problems have long been recognized as a health hazard in the United States, Europe and other industrialized countries, but in recent years the same worries have begun to emerge in many less well-off places.

?Obesity has penetrated the remotest places on Earth,? says Stanley Ulijaszek of the University of Oxford. However, a recent Vatican conference concluded that about 800 million people worldwide are still malnourished, while the International Obesity Taskforce estimates that 300 million people are obese.
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Scientists have developed a new class of drug which enables users to lose weight without cutting calories or exercising. Obese men who took part in a trial lost an average of more than a pound a month after being injected with a single dose of the drug.

The drug has been developed by a team of researchers at Monash University in Australia, led by Professor Frank Ng. Ng was investigating the causes of diabetes when he made the breakthrough leading to the production of the drug called Advanced Obesity Drug 9604 (AOD9604), which speeds up the body?s metabolism. Further trials of the drug will be carried out throughout the year and if they go well, a pill could be on the market in four years? time.
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