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Pediatrics

Neural differences of inhibitory control between adolescents with obesity and their peers

Abstract

Background/objective

Inhibitory control, the ability to suppress prepotent responses and resist irrelevant stimuli, is thought to play a critical role in the manifestation and maintenance of obesity in adolescents. Adolescence is a unique developmental stage characterized by significant maturational changes in cortical structures (i.e., prefrontal cortex: PFC) that relate to inhibitory control processes. The current study investigated the behavioral and neurophysiological correlates of inhibitory control in adolescents with obesity.

Subjects/methods

We compared 18 normal-weight and 22 adolescents with obesity on performance and electroencephalography (EEG)-based measures during a Go/NoGo task. We investigated N2 and P3 event-related potential (ERP) components.

Results

Adolescents with obesity showed lower accuracy compared to their normal-weight peers in NoGo trials where greater amounts of inhibitory control effort were required (p = 0.03). Adolescents with obesity had larger NoGo N2 amplitude relative to the Go N2 amplitude (p = 0.03), whereas this difference was not observed in the healthy weight sample. Furthermore, a lower self-efficacy of individual’s ability to control eating behaviors in challenging situations (as measured by the Weight Efficacy Lifestyle-Short Form) directly correlated with larger NoGo N2 amplitudes for both obese (p = 0.03) and normal weight groups (p = 0.01).

Conclusions

These findings suggested that obesity in adolescence is associated with a decreased ability to modulate cognitive conflict during the inhibitory control processing. The individual differences in conflict monitoring during situations where greater amounts of inhibitory control effort were required might provide an explanation for overeating behaviors in obese adolescents.

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Acknowledgments

We wish to thank all the research assistants at the Neurobiological Lab for Learning and Development (NLD) who have helped with the data collection. This work was supported by the Transforming Lives grant (Woltering) awarded in 2015 by the College of Education and Human Development at Texas A&M University.

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Correspondence to Steven Woltering.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethics approval

The present study was approved by the Institutional Research Ethic Board (IRB) at Texas A&M University (protocol reference: IRB2010-0877D). All participants and one of their guardians provided informed written consent prior to the start of the study

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Chen, S., Jia, Y. & Woltering, S. Neural differences of inhibitory control between adolescents with obesity and their peers. Int J Obes 42, 1753–1761 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41366-018-0142-x

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