Editorial: To Eat or Not to Eat: Advancing the Neuroscience of Hedonic Versus Controlled Eating Across Weight and Eating Disorders

Research output: Contribution to journalEditorial (Lead article)Contributedpeer-review

Abstract

Excessive weight and obesity, especially with childhood onset, is associated with long-term morbidity and mortality and places a major burden on the health care system. In the United States, 17% of children and adolescents are obese (32% overweight). By adulthood, the number rises to 34% or even 68% when also considering overweight individuals. 1 Conventional nonsurgical treatments are often ineffective, and weight loss achieved with behaviorally oriented therapy programs is usually small (∼5%) and short-lived. 2 A better understanding of the associated psychological mechanisms and their neurobiological underpinnings may allow for the development of more efficient, potentially brain-based, therapeutic interventions. A growing number of human functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies point to alterations in reward-related corticostriatal circuity and the hypothalamus, a key area in energy homeostasis. 3 Recent studies have analyzed resting state functional connectivity (rsFC), a technique sensitive to changes in the interaction between distant brain regions, which is particularly advantageous in clinical samples, as it requires little compliance and as scanning time is relatively short.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)151-153
Number of pages3
JournalJournal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
Volume58
Issue number2
Publication statusPublished - Feb 2019
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

PubMed 30738539
ORCID /0000-0002-2864-5578/work/146641863
ORCID /0000-0003-2132-4445/work/146642336
WOS 000461002600001

Keywords

Sustainable Development Goals

Keywords

  • Prefrontal cortex, Obesity, Exercise