Weight Differences in Neurofunctional Activity to Visual Food Cues: A Meta-Analysis of Neuroimaging Studies
Year: 2013
Type: review
Study designs: Systematic Review, Meta-Analysis
Abstract: Obesity is a complex disorder associated with serious health risks.Examining the brain's activity in response to food and how it varies between the healthy weight and obese may help researchers and clinicians understand the source of the behaviors that lead to overeating and obesity and in understanding them, help prevent them.Multiple neuroimaging studies have investigated weight differences in functional activity to food cues but have found variable results.By performing a series of meta-analyses of functional neuroimaging studies of the weight differences in activity to food images, this study isolated differences in processing food stimuli between the healthy weight and the obese.In this study, 41 papers and 4 sets of unpublished data on functional activity to food images were analyzed using an Activation Likelihood Estimation meta-analytic approach to examine neurofunctional differences between the healthy weight and obese.These analyses also addressed how hunger state affects differences in functional activity between weight groups and identified areas of the brain that were active when viewing food cues in the obese.Greater activity in the obese compared to healthy weight in the anterior cingulate, superior temporal/insula, and amygdala suggest that visual food cues provoke greater motivation, greater attention and taste processing, and greater caloric evaluation in the obese.Greater hippocampal activity in the healthy weight compared to the obese may indicate poor interoceptive processing in the obese.Differences in location of medial prefrontal activity between the obese and healthy weight may indicate altered risk vs. reward processing.This meta-analysis may help researchers and clinicians understand and treat obesity related behaviors by identifying the altered functional regions that lead to obesity, providing a guide for future research on what areas need to be the focus of interventions.
Author: James T. Kennedy
Institution: Case Western Reserve University
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2625372542