A review of the relationship between eating behavior, obesity and functional brain network organization

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Obesity is a major public health issue affecting nearly 40% of American adults and is associated with increased mortality and elevated risk for a number of physical and psychological illnesses. Obesity is associated with impairments in executive functions such as decision making and inhibitory control, as well as in reward valuation, which is thought to contribute to difficulty sustaining healthy lifestyle behaviors, including adhering to a healthy diet. Growing evidence indicates that these impairments are accompanied by disruptions in functional brain networks, particularly those that support self-regulation, reward valuation, self-directed thinking and homeostatic control. Weight-related differences in task-evoked and resting-state connectivity have most frequently been noted in the executive control network (ECN), salience network (SN) and default mode network (DMN), with obesity generally being associated with weakened connectivity in the ECN and enhanced connectivity in the SN and DMN. Similar disruptions have been observed in the much smaller literature examining the relationship between diet and disordered eating behaviors on functional network organization. The purpose of this narrative review was to summarize what is currently known about how obesity and eating behavior relate to functional brain networks, describe common patterns and provide recommendations for future research based on the identified gaps in knowledge.</jats:p>

Altered Patterns of Functional Connectivity and Causal Connectivity in Salience Subnetwork of Subjective Cognitive Decline and Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment

“…Numerous authors have applied resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) as one of the principal means to clarify the cognitive mechanism of AD (Yang et al, 2017;Marchitelli et al, 2018;Passamonti et al, 2019). Besides, the brain network researches relying on rs-fMRI serve the purpose of revealing the mechanism of neural activity in the brain, which have also important application value and significance in exploring the pathogenesis of AD (Donofry et al, 2019;. Among them, plentiful works have been examined by scholars involving in the relationships between salience network (SN) and other networks in the brain (Fredericks et al, 2019;Lee S. E. et al, 2019).…”

Health neuroscience 2.0: integration with social, cognitive and affective neuroscience

“…Illustrative examples from the current special issue that capitalize on this perspective include those that use state-of-the-science analytical approaches (e.g. machine learning to identify multivariate patterns of neural activity) to predict a host of the most pressing health issues facing society today: cardiovascular disease ( Gianaros et al , 2020 ), obesity ( Stice et al , 2019 ; Cosme et al , 2020 ; Donofry et al , 2020 ; Verstynen et al , 2020 ) and physical pain ( Reddan et al , 2020 ). Similar approaches help us understand links between brain patterns of activity to emotional content and systemic inflammation, a key biological mediator linking psychological experience and health ( Alvarez et al , 2020 ), or to health messages and population-level sharing of the information ( Dore et al ., in press ).…”

Altered patterns of brain dynamics linked with body mass index in youth with autism

“…The prevalence rates of both ASD and obesity are rising, with 1 in 54 children in the United States diagnosed with ASD (Maenner et al, 2020) and 18.4% of school‐aged children falling within the obese range (Hales et al, 2017; Sanyaolu et al, 2019). Childhood overweight/obesity (OWOB) increases the likelihood of becoming obese in adulthood (Deckelbaum & Williams, 2001) and acquiring adverse health conditions (Biro & Wien, 2010; Donofry et al, 2019). Being OWOB during childhood is also associated with heightened risks of social isolation and impaired psychosocial functioning (Rankin et al, 2016).…”