There are 2 clinical trials

Clinical Trials

1 Translational Neuroscience: Response Training for Obesity Treatment

This project will test whether a food response training intervention produces lasting body fat loss, use objective brain imaging to examine the mechanism of effect of this treatment and investigate the generalizability of the training to non-training foods, and examine factors that should amplify intervention effects to provide a test of the intervention theory. This novel treatment represents a bottom-up implicit training intervention that does not rely on executive control, prolonged caloric deprivation, and expensive clinicians to deliver, like behavioral weight loss treatments that have not produced lasting weight loss. If this computer-based response training intervention produces sustained body fat loss in overweight individuals, it could be easily implemented very broadly at almost no expense, addressing a leading public health problem.

NCT03375853 Obesity Hyperphagia Feeding and Eating Disorders Behavioral: Computer Based Response Training Weight Loss Intervention Behavioral: Generic Response Training Control Intervention

MeSH:Obesity Hyperphagia Feeding and Eating Disorders

HPO:Obesity Polyphagia

2 Media Multi-tasking and Cued Overeating: Assessing the Pathway and Piloting an Intervention Using an Attentional Network Framework

Childhood obesity is a critical public health problem in the United States. One factor known to contribute to childhood obesity is excess consumption. Importantly, excess consumption related to weight gain is not necessarily driven by hunger. For example, environmental food cues stimulate brain reward regions and lead to overeating even after a child has eaten to satiety. This type of cued eating is associated with increased attention to food cues; the amount of time a child spends looking at food cues (e.g., food advertisements) is associated with increased caloric intake. However, individual susceptibility to environmental food cues remains unknown. It is proposed that the prevalent practice of media multi-tasking—simultaneously attending to multiple electronic media sources—increases attention to peripheral food cues in the environment and thereby plays an important role in the development of obesity. It is hypothesized that multi-tasking teaches children to engage in constant task switching that makes them more responsive to peripheral cues, many of which are potentially harmful (such as those that promote overeating). The overarching hypothesis is that media multi-tasking alters the attentional networks of the brain that control attention to environmental cues. High media multi-tasking children are therefore particularly susceptible to food cues, thereby leading to increased cued eating. It is also predicted that attention modification training can provide a protective effect against detrimental attentional processing caused multi-tasking, by increasing the proficiency of the attention networks. These hypotheses will be tested by assessing the pathway between media-multitasking, attention to food cues, and cued eating. It will also be examined whether it is possible to intervene on this pathway by piloting an at-home attention modification training intervention designed to reduce attention to food cues. It is our belief that this research will lead to the development of low-cost, scalable tools that can train attention networks so that children are less influenced by peripheral food cues, a known cause of overeating. For example, having children practice attention modification intervention tasks regularly (which could be accomplished through user-friendly computer games or cell phone/tablet apps) might offset the negative attentional effects of media multi-tasking.

NCT03882957 Attention Concentration Difficulty Obesity, Childhood Behavioral: Sustained attention Behavioral: media multi-task Other: Video

MeSH:Pediatric Obesity Hyperphagia

HPO:Polyphagia

HPO Nodes