Circuits de la récompense et prise alimentaire

Several billion years of evolution were needed to create an adaptive mechanism to insure the proper energy intake required for the survival of any organism. A plethora of hormonal and nervous signals are integrated at the level of the hypothalamus and the brainstem and participate to the regulation of energy homeostasis. The motivational and hedonic aspect of food intake comes in addition to the homeostatic regulation and primarily encoded by the neuronal network of the mesolimbic dopaminergic system (MDS). The action of feeding is the result of a complex behavioral sequence resulting from the integration, at the central level, of metabolic signal of hunger and satiety but also of organoleptic properties of food, such as taste and odors together with emotional factors including stress and anxiety. Hence, some feeding behavior alteration including bulimia and compulsive intake may have common features with addictive behavior associated with drug of abuse.