Studying the Psychological and Interoceptive Contributions to Eating
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Studying the Psychological and Interoceptive Contributions to Eating
IRAS ID
251801
Contact name
Paul C. Fletcher
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Cambridge and Cambridge University Hospitals Trust
Duration of Study in the UK
3 years, 0 months, 0 days
Research summary
This study concerns factors contributing to appetite and eating in healthy people and in patients for whom eating patterns may have become disrupted. Ultimately, the aim is to understand over-consumption as well as patterns of consumption that have become disrupted as a consequence of disturbances in body-brain communication.
Health-harming over-consumption is a major contributor to morbidity and premature mortality. Widespread and easy environmental availability of aggressively-marketed energy-dense foods has led to marked increases in average body mass and in the numbers of people deemed overweight and obese. But a proportion of people appear to be resistant to this obesogenic environment and individual variation in susceptibility, which is highly heritable, is expressed in predominantly terms of neurobehavioural characteristics. The challenge therefore, if we are to understand comprehensively the routes to over-consumption, is to characterise how metabolic, psychological and environmental factors combine and integrate to shape eating behaviours.
In the current study, participants will be invited for a two day, overnight study in the Cambridge Clinical Research Centre at Addenbrooke’s hospital. Over the two days, we will examine a complementary set of cognitive, neural and behavioural measures, and we will characterise how these are influenced by a set of key experimentally-controlled factors: (i) hunger (ii) obesity (iii) clinical perturbations of metabolic/bodily signalling and of brain processing of these signals. The latter will be achieved by studying two groups patients: those who are undergoing gastrectomy and those with specific genetic mutations affecting the brain circuits in the hypothalamus that control appetite and eating.
In addition to examining these primary effects, we will carry out, within-group analyses of lean and obese people to gain insights into how individual variations in metabolic, endocrine, cognitive and neural characteristics associate with appetite and health-harming patterns of consumption. These interlinked studies will run over the course of 3 years.REC name
East of England - Cambridge Central Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
18/EE/0387
Date of REC Opinion
5 Feb 2019
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion