Signe Sørensen Torekov receives the Jahre Prize
Each year the University of Oslo awards the Anders Jahre Prizes for excellent research within basic and clinical medicine to a group of Nordic researchers. This year, Associate Professor Signe Sørensen Torekov receives the award in collaboration with Professor Simon Bekker-Jensen from the Center for Healthy Aging and the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine.
Signe is awarded the prize or her research into obesity and diabetes. One of her main results is the understanding that even though the human body is geared to fight weight loss there is hope.
After losing weight the body produces excessive amounts of the hunger hormone ghrelin in proportion to the appetite-suppressing hormone GLP-1, meaning that the body easily regains weight. But Signe’s research also shows that if a person is able to maintain the same weight for a year after weight loss, the body will reach a stage where it begins to produce a lot of the appetite-suppressing hormone, while production of the hunger hormones is normalised.