DHEA the Slimming Hormone? Study Finds: Dehydroepiandrosterone Directly Inhibits Cortisol Synthesis in Rodent Adipocytes
After initially being hailed as the fountain of youth, the pharma-financed medical sciences dropped DHEA, when investors realized that a naturally occurring hormone would not be patentable. This and some discouraging and/or inconclusive results from long-term studies had DHEA literally disappear from the research scene for quite some time. Therefore, I am positively surprised that on the forthcoming European Congress of Endocrinology 2011 researchers from the Kobe University in Japan are going to present a paper ( Tagawa. 2011 ) that shows that there may in fact be more to the initial findings of DHEA induced weight loss than follow-up studies would have it. Tagawa et al. investigated the possible mechanism behind the weight loss effects of DHEA and found that there is a direct inhibitory effect of DHEA on glucocorticoid (re-)synthesis in adipose tissue: Using differentiated 3T3-L1 adipocytes, we demonstrated that DHEA inhibited 11β-HSD1 activity at a concentration of 1 μM within...