ESPEYB15 11 Obesity and Weight Regulation The brain decides weight gain (1 abstracts)
John Hopkins University School of Medicine, Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Baltimore, MD, USA
To read the full abstract: NeuroImage 2017; 159: 236-247
The results of this study suggest that, compared to adolescents with a low risk, lean adolescents with a high familial obesity risk show a weaker activation of neural systems subserving attentional self-regulation in response to food-denoting words. These same changes were found in overweight or obese adolescents. It is interesting that exposure even to food words (which are relatively minimal food cues compared to food images which are more commonly used in functional MRI studies of food cue responsiveness) revealed significant differences between obesity risk groups. The findings are unique and were obtained in a relatively small sample size, hence they should be considered preliminary and deserving of replication.