Neural Activation to Food Cues and Cognition in Sedentary Obese Endometrial Cancer Survivors Seeking Weight Loss

Abstract

PURPOSE: Sedentary behavior and obesity increase the risk of endometrial cancer (EC), particularly Type I forms, which are increasing in the U.S. Further, although death rates from most cancers are decreasing, overall mortality rates for EC are increasing; and, obese EC patients have significantly poorer survival rates compared to normal weight EC patients. No prior studies have examined neural activation in response to food cues as well as sedentary behavior and cognition in obese EC survivors. METHODS: Therefore, we evaluated appetitive behavior using a visual food cue functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) task as well as sedentary behavior and cognition using Trails A & B and Symbol Digits Modalities Tests in 42 obese EC survivors seeking weight loss. RESULTS: We found increased activation in response to high-calorie food cues after eating a meal in brain regions associated with food-related reward (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, amygdala; whole brain cluster corrected, p<0.05) in obese EC survivors. In addition, cognitive tests suggest scores in obese EC patients are lower than normative data for similar age and gender. We are currently evaluating correlations between sedentary behavior, cognitive scores and neural signals in differentially activated brain regions. CONCLUSIONS: To our knowledge, this is the first study to evaluate cognitive and sedentary behavior correlates of neural activation in response to food cues in obese EC survivors and, these data may also help inform future work in other adult obese populations with and without cancer. This work was supported by NIH NCI R01-CA175100.