Research paper
Cains S, Blomeley C, Kollo M, Rácz R, Burdakov D. Agrp neuron activity is required for alcohol-induced overeating. Nature Communications. 2017 Jan 10;8:14014. doi:10.1038/ncomms14014. PMCID: PMC5234092.
Why we cite it
Identifies, in mice, "a biological factor required for appetite evoked by alcohol": ethanol activates hypothalamic Agrp neurons, "normally activated by starvation", in what the authors call "sustaining false 'starvation alarms' despite extracellular nutrient sufficiency". (Corrected 2026-09-10: only and creating false starvation signals survived in this sentence after Extracted knowledge and `kal01` were corrected at 17:12 the same day, and after this sentence was itself rewritten at 18:21; the in-record sibling miss, missed on both desks.) This is a mouse study, run in single-housed mice "to minimize social confounders" that human alcohol-eating research cannot exclude, and, in this library's reading rather than the paper's, offers a mechanism for the human findings in cal01 and cal02. Complements the behavioural (cal02) and review (cal01, cal03) evidence with circuit-level neuroscience. (Corrected 2026-09-10 from "Identifies the specific neurobiological mechanism behind alcohol-induced overeating" and "it removes the social confounds": the paper presents "results suggesting" a mechanism and minimises confounds rather than removing them.)