Body and drug basics
Hypothalamus
Last updated
The hypothalamus is a small region at the base of the brain that keeps the body's internal conditions steady: temperature, thirst, hunger, sleep timing and the response to stress. It does much of this by sending chemical instructions a very short distance down to the pituitary gland, which then signals the rest of the body. It is the point where the nervous system and the hormone system meet.
Why it matters here
Every hormonal axis described on this site begins here, so a compound said to act on an axis is acting somewhere in a chain that starts in the hypothalamus. It is also why appetite and sleep turn up in the same records as hormones.
What it is not
Not a gland in the ordinary sense, and not the pituitary. The hypothalamus is brain tissue that gives the instructions; the pituitary is the gland below it that carries them out. The two are named together so often that they are frequently treated as one thing.
Also called
- hypothalamus
- hypothalamic
- hypothalamus gland
Compounds carrying this term
None on file yet. This term is in the controlled vocabulary but no compound record currently uses it — which is a statement about our coverage, not about the term.