Comparing healthy adolescent females with and without parental history of eating pathology on neural responsivity to food and thin models and other potential risk factors.

Abstract

We tested the hypotheses that female adolescents at risk for future eating disorders, based on parental history of binge eating and compensatory weight control behaviors, would show greater reward and attention region response to thin-models and tastes, anticipated tastes, and images of high-calorie foods, lower inhibitory circuitry response to a high-calorie food-specific go/no-go paradigm, and greater limbic circuitry response to negative mood induction. We recruited female adolescents free of binge eating or compensatory behaviors (N = 88; M_age = 14.6 [SD = .9]; 72% White) with versus without parental history of eating pathology. Parental-history-positive youth showed elevated reward region response (putamen) to anticipated tastes of chocolate milkshake, and greater emotionality, caloric deprivation, weight and shape overvaluation, and feeling fat (though no difference in weight), but lower liking of high-calorie foods, which were medium to large effects. We did not observe statistically significant differences in neural responsivity for the other paradigms. The evidence that parental-history-positive youth show greater reward region response to anticipated tastes of high-calorie food, overvaluation of weight/shape, feeling fat, caloric deprivation, emotionality, and lower liking of high-calorie foods before evidencing behavioral symptoms of eating disorders are novel findings. Weight/shape overvaluation may contribute to feeling fat, lower food liking, and caloric deprivation; the latter may drive elevated reward region response to anticipated consumption of high-calorie food and emotionality. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).