Brain Responses to High-Calorie Visual Food Cues in Individuals with Normal-Weight or Obesity: An Activation Likelihood Estimation Meta-Analysis.

Yingkai Yang,Qian Wu,Filip Morys

doi:10.3390/brainsci11121587

Abstract

Overconsumption of high-calorie or unhealthy foods commonly leads to weight gain. Understanding people’s neural responses to high-calorie food cues might help to develop better interventions for preventing or reducing overeating and weight gain. In this review, we conducted a coordinate-based meta-analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging studies of viewing high-calorie food cues in both normal-weight people and people with obesity. Electronic databases were searched for relevant articles, retrieving 59 eligible studies containing 2410 unique participants. The results of an activation likelihood estimation indicate large clusters in a range of structures, including the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), amygdala, insula/frontal operculum, culmen, as well as the middle occipital gyrus, lingual gyrus, and fusiform gyrus. Conjunction analysis suggested that both normal-weight people and people with obesity activated OFC, supporting that the two groups share common neural substrates of reward processing when viewing high-calorie food cues. The contrast analyses did not show significant activations when comparing obesity with normal-weight. Together, these results provide new important evidence for the neural mechanism underlying high-calorie food cues processing, and new insights into common and distinct brain activations of viewing high-calorie food cues between people with obesity and normal-weight people.

Highlights

The prevalence of obesity is problematic and rising in both developed and developing nations [1]
An Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) meta-analysis including 12 experiments and 201 participants reported that visual food cues were reliably associated with increased blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) response in the visual system proper rather than reward-related brain network [28]
We observed that viewing high-calorie food cues consistently activated the bilateral lingual gyrus, fusiform gyrus, orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), amygdala, insula, as well as the right middle occipital gyrus, left culmen, and the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG)

Summary

Introduction

The prevalence of obesity is problematic and rising in both developed and developing nations [1]. Excessive weight has become an increasing threat to healthcare systems [6], and accounts for an estimated 2.8 million deaths per annum worldwide [7] These statistics have prompted a plethora of research aimed at understanding factors that contribute to the development or maintenance of obesity [8,9,10,11,12]. The constant exposure to high-calorie foods and food cues may promote overconsumption by stimulating brain reward and motivation pathways [19,20] In this vein, using techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (f MRI), a growing number of research has been conducted to investigate neural responses to various forms of food stimuli [21], such as liquid tastants, food odors [22], or visual food cues [23,24]. An ALE meta-analysis including 12 experiments and 201 participants reported that visual food cues were reliably associated with increased blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) response in the visual system proper (e.g., the occipital lobe) rather than reward-related brain network (e.g., the orbitofrontal cortex) [28]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion