As Velloso noted in his 2005 paper, this makes perfect sense. Previous research had already implicated chronic inflammation in insulin resistance—a condition in which tissues like liver and muscle have a harder time responding to the glucose-controlling hormone insulin—and this process had already been linked to increased diabetes risk. It wasn’t a major leap to suppose that inflammation in the hypothalamus might cause resistance to leptin and insulin, increasing the adiposity set point and contributing to obesity risk.
