Associations between fasting brain perfusion and eating behaviour in lean individuals and individuals with obesity
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Julkaisu on tekijänoikeussäännösten alainen. Teosta voi lukea ja tulostaa henkilökohtaista käyttöä varten. Käyttö kaupallisiin tarkoituksiin on kielletty.
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The rising prevalence of both obesity and eating disorders has occurred alongside rapid changes in the modern food environment. These complex interplays of environmental, psychological, and biological factors represent a growing public health challenge, underscoring the need for improved understanding of disordered eating behaviours and obesity for targeted medical and behavioural interventions that acknowledge the heterogeneity of these conditions. Obesity and disordered eating have both been previously associated with alterations in brain function, especially in regions involved in reward processing, emotion regulation and appetite control. However, evidence on the relationship between these factors and fasting-state brain perfusion is limited. Studying these associations may clarify some of the baseline neural characteristics of obesity and eating behaviour.
This thesis aims to investigate whether fasting-state brain perfusion differs according to eating behaviour and BMI status, both at the whole-brain level and within specific brain areas.
The study sample consisted of 32 healthy participants from two different clinical trials, the FoodBAT and MOTORBAT studies, both conducted at the Turku PET Centre and Turku University hospital. The collected data included fasting-state PET/CT scans acquired with radiolabelled water, metabolic and anthropometric measures, and standardized questionnaires assessing eating behaviour and depressive symptoms. The PET images were processed with the MAGIA pipeline and analysed with SPM12. The region of interest ROI-based analyses and statistics were performed in SPSS.
The findings from the study suggest that eating behaviour might be associated with fasting brain perfusion levels, particularly in women. Women with higher Binge Eating Scale (BES) scores revealed a cluster with less perfusion, located mainly in the amygdala and parahippocampal gyrus, compared to women with lower BES scores. Higher BMI also showed a trend toward lower perfusion in several brain areas both in the full sample as well as in women only. These results indicate that greater adiposity and binge eating tendencies may be associated with lower fasting-state cerebral perfusion. In contrast, depressive symptoms did not show a significant association with any of the perfusion measures.
Overall, these results suggest that lower fasting brain perfusion may correlate with binge eating tendencies as well as higher BMI and adiposity. In particular, lower perfusion in amygdala may reflect altered neural processes related to emotion, reward, and appetite regulation in individuals with a higher BMI and more pronounced binge eating tendencies. However, these findings should be interpreted with caution due to the small sample size and the subclinical nature of the binge eating symptoms. Future studies should consider examining these associations in larger samples and more equal BMI distribution.