Hi Reddit, My name is Selena Bartlett and I am a Professor of Neuroscience and Group Leader at the Translational Research Institute, Institute for Health and Biomedical Innovation at the Queensland University of QUT. My research focuses on developing innovative approaches to prevention and treatment of addictions. We focus on trying to develop strategies to help people overcome addiction to sugar that drives obesity and alcohol for alcoholism. And my name is Arnauld Belmer and I am postdoctoral researcher at the Queensland University of QUT. My research focuses on identifying the brain circuitry underlying the development of dependence and addiction, including to sugar or alcohol. My (Selena’s) laboratory focuses on dissecting the molecular signaling and neural circuitry pathways that have been changed by long-term overconsumption of sugar and/or alcohol. At the lab, we focus on two important areas associated with addiction, the amygdala that processes fear, stress and reward and the prefrontal cortex, that is important for impulse control and decision making. My lab has shown, that overconsumption of sucrose changes the neuronal circuitry in both the amygdala (which this paper is about) and the prefrontal cortex. The shocking finding for my lab, was that sugar changes the brain in exactly the same way that long-term consumption of alcohol does. Today, we will discuss the changes happening in the amygdala from overconsumption of sucrose. We hypothesize that these maladaptive changes in the BLA lead to changes in signalling activity in the amygdala, that is the basolateral amygdala becomes more sensitive to stress and fear signaling over the long-term. The consequence is that the reward/motivation circuits become down-regulated, this leads to people using high calorie rewards, such as sucrose, to reduce activity in the over-reactive amygdala. We recently published a paper titled Binge-like sucrose consumption reduces the dendritic length and complexity of principal neurons in the adolescent rat basolateral amygdala in PLOS ONE, showing that chronic binge-like sucrose consumption elicits maladaptive changes in the morphology of neurons in the amygdala. We will be answering your questions at 1pm ET – Ask Us Anything!