Browsing by Subject "sibutramine"

Obesity is a significant problem for public health. Obesity develops when systems controlling food intake and consumption are imbalanced. Many different brain areas and transmitters contribute to maintain energy balance. Signals that are secreted proportional to body's fat storage (leptin and insulin) regulate energy balance in a long run. Hormones that are secreted from gastrointestinal tract control food intake in a short run. These hormones are for example cholecystokinin, peptide YY and ghrelin. Drug treatment for obesity is limited because effective drugs are lacking. The only drug to treat obesity in Europe is orlistat but it's effectiveness is modest. The development for new antiobesity drugs has been busy. Problems in drug development have however delayed drugs in the market. The aim of this study was to develop a method with which we could measure how much food zebrafish (Danio rerio) has been eaten and to study how different drugs affect feeding behavior of the zebrafish. The purpose was also to do high throughput screening of antiobesity drug with this method and to study how genes affect feeding. The amount of food that zebrafish ate was able to be measured by utilizing fluorescent rotifers as fish's food. Drugs that are known to affect feeding (fluoxetine and rimonabant) reduced the amount of food zebrafish ate when measurement was done in 6-well plate and with two hours feeding. Sibutramine did not affect food intake, although it has been shown to reduce food intake in zebrafish in another study. The effect of gene knock down was also studied with morpholino oligonucleotides. MANF, th2 or galanin gene knock down did not affect food intake in zebrafish. The conclusion is that the new method is well suited for food intake measurements and drug effectiveness studies. The method can not be used in high throughput screening because results can not be analyzed by a plate reader and the feeding can not be done in 96-well plate.