Heightened sensitivity to high-calorie foods in children at risk for obesity: insights from behavior, neuroimaging, and genetics

Pediatric obesity is a major public health concern. Genetic susceptibility and increased availability of energy-dense food are known risk factors for obesity. However, the extent to which these factors jointly bias behavior and neural circuitry towards increased adiposity in children remains unclear...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Brain imaging and behavior 2023-10, Vol.17 (5), p.461-470
Main Authors: Rapuano, Kristina M., Tejavibulya, Link, Dinc, Eda Naz, Li, Anfei, Davis, Haley, Korn, Rachel, Leibel, Rudolph L., Walsh, B. Timothy, Ranzenhofer, Lisa, Rosenbaum, Michael, Casey, B. J., Mayer, Laurel
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adipose tissue
At risk youth
Behavior
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Biomedicine
Brain
Brain mapping
Calories
Children
Circuits
Cortex (cingulate)
Energy intake
False alarms
Food
Food availability
Functional magnetic resonance imaging
Gene polymorphism
Go/no-go discrimination learning
Low calorie
Medical imaging
Neural networks
Neuroimaging
Neuropsychology
Neuroradiology
Neurosciences
Obesity
Original Research
Pediatrics
Polymorphism
Psychiatry
Public health
Risk factors
Sensitivity
Toys
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Pediatric obesity is a major public health concern. Genetic susceptibility and increased availability of energy-dense food are known risk factors for obesity. However, the extent to which these factors jointly bias behavior and neural circuitry towards increased adiposity in children remains unclear. While undergoing fMRI, 108 children (ages 5-11y) performed a food-specific go/no-go task. Participants were instructed to either respond (“go”) or inhibit responding (“no-go”) to images of food or toys. Half of the runs depicted high-calorie foods (e.g., pizza) whereas the other half depicted low-calorie foods (e.g., salad). Children were also genotyped for a DNA polymorphism associated with energy intake and obesity ( FTO rs9939609) to examine the influence of obesity risk on behavioral and brain responses to food. Participants demonstrated differences in behavioral sensitivity to high- and low-calorie food images depending on task demands. Participants were slower but more accurate at detecting high- (relative to low-) calorie foods when responding to a neutral stimulus (i.e., toys) and worse at detecting toys when responding to high-calorie foods. Inhibition failures were accompanied by salience network activity (anterior insula, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex), which was driven by false alarms to food images. Children at a greater genetic risk for obesity (dose-dependent model of the FTO genotype) demonstrated pronounced brain and behavioral relationships such that genetic risk was associated with heightened sensitivity to high-calorie food images and increased anterior insula activity. These findings suggest that high-calorie foods may be particularly salient to children at risk for developing eating habits that promote obesity.
ISSN:1931-7557
1931-7565
DOI:10.1007/s11682-023-00773-7