Abstract
Background: Overweight people have been revealed to have poor cognitive flexibility. Cognitive flexibility reflects proactive and reactive control abilities. However, the impairment had not been explicitly positioned at the cognitive stage. Therefore, this study provides increased support for impairment of cognitive flexibility due to overweight. Method: The study included 34 overweight and 35 normal-weight participants. They were required to complete the food and flower target AX-continuous performance test (AX–CPT), including the resting-state fMRI and cue-triggered food craving subscales. We compared the performance difference between the two tasks. Furthermore, we investigated whether the cue-triggered food cravings and the corresponding brain regions mediated the effect of overweight on the two control mechanisms. Result: Significant differences were found only in the food target AX-CPT task, where overweight participants performed worse. Cue-triggered food cravings mediated this relationship. Additionally, we found that the brain regions associated with cue-triggered food cravings (bilateral SFG) can completely mediate the relationship between BMI and the z-value of the fat mass index and sensitivity to proactive control. Conclusion: In the food target task, overweight participants performed worse in both control mechanisms. Moreover, we also revealed the potential mechanism by which being overweight might affect the two control mechanisms through cue-triggered food cravings.
Highlights
Overweight and obesity are becoming major public health concerns
(25.0–29.9 kg/m2 ) and 35 normal-weight participants (18.5–24.9 kg/m2 ) took part in the study. They all completed the collection of body mass index (BMI), fat mass index (FMI), skeletal muscle mass (SMM), and AX-continuous performance test, but due to the lack of food-craving scale and fMRI data, one participant was excluded from subsequent analysis
Based on resting-state fMRI imaging data, we found a positive correlation between food cravings and the functional connection between the bilateral orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), which can completely mediate the relationship between BMI and proactive control
Summary
Overweight and obesity are becoming major public health concerns. The prevalence of obesity is rising rapidly worldwide, especially among adolescents and young adults. In the food-specific switching task, the P3 amplitude increased significantly, implying that more cognitive resources were needed to suppress food-specific stimuli [23] These results suggest that food has a substantial reward value for certain groups of people (overweight and obese people and restrained eaters). Brain-imaging evidence has shown that overweight adolescents respond to sweetened beverages through addiction pathways This leads to hyperactivity in reward-related regions, including the putamen, caudate nucleus, orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), prefrontal cortex (PFC), anterior insular cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, parahippocampal cortex, thalamus, and posterior cingulate cortex [24]. The reward brain area related to cue-triggered food cravings might be the neural mechanism for worse reactive and proactive control in the overweight group
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