New research links hormone to weight loss

A hormone thought to boost appetite rises in the bloodstream after dieters lose lots of weight, possibly explaining why it's so hard to keep weight off long term -- and offering a new target for a diet drug, researchers say.

Their small study of severely obese people found much higher levels of a recently discovered hormone made by stomach cells, ghrelin, in the blood after the patients had lost significant weight.

However, very little ghrelin was in the blood of several people who lost weight after gastric bypass surgery, an operation that sews shut 95 percent of the stomach and reroutes the flow of food.

--From wire reports