Research suggests that the drivers to overeat differ between men and women, indicating a potential need for personalized obesity treatments.
Women who were obese tended to show alterations in emotion-related brain regions, which was associated with greater compulsive eating. Men, meanwhile, had eating behavior and obesity that was centered around gut sensations and abdominal discomfort.
The team, led by senior researcher Arpana Gupta, PhD, Neuroimaging core director at the G. Oppenheimer Center for Neurobiology of Stress and Resilience at UCLA, publish their findings in the journal Brain Communications.
Professor Gupta said it was already known that brain signatures were altered in obese individuals, with accompanying implications on how food is viewed and how this leads to food cravings, altered eating patterns, and obesity.
“However, looking at differences in how these brain patterns differ by sex is a game changer as it suggests that the pathways to how women and men develop obesity are different,” she told Inside Precision Medicine.
“These results suggest that the way the brain processes food cues are different in men and women.”
The researchers used multimodal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to assess brain structure, connectivity, and function in order to better understand how obesity manifests differently in the brains of women and men.
These data were then combined with information gleaned from participants in a battery of behavioral and clinical questionnaires to determine neuro-behavioral features that could distinguish body mass index (BMI) groups.
The study included 78 people with a high BMI greater than 25 kg/m2, all aged 18 to 55 years, of whom 55 were women. In addition, there were 105 non-obese individuals, with a BMI of 19—20 kg/m2, from a similar age group, of whom 63 were women.
Results showed specific network connectivity changes associated with high BMI, regardless of sex.
There were also sex-specific differences in several of the brain’s networks associated with early life adversity, mental health quality, and the way sensory stimulation is experienced.
In women, alterations in brain regions and networks were associated with early life trauma.
This tallies with previous research showing that obese women may have greater anxiety and lower resilience than men, as well as difficulty combining emotions with action-directed goal planning. There were also indications in the salience network of the brain that these women were susceptible to the sight, smell and taste of ultra-processed foods.
A Data Integration Analysis for Biomarker discovery using Latent Components (DIABLO) was conducted to determine whether clinical features, brain morphometry, functional connectivity, and anatomical connectivity could accurately differentiate participants by obesity and sex.
It was able to distinguish high-BMI from non-obese individuals and men with a high BMI from women with a high BMI, with balanced accuracies of 77% and 75% respectively.
Gupta noted the strong association between neural signals, clinical markers and vulnerability factors, which highlight the importance of brain-gut mechanisms in obesity.
“This has huge implications for personalized treatments,” she said.
“For example, when designing treatments, we may have to consider emotion regulation techniques and vulnerability factors such as early life adversity for women, which may not be as pertinent variables to highlight when implementing obesity interventions for men.”
