As nearly all of my posts preceding this one have indicated, the brain exists in a constant state of equilibrium, striking a variable balance between responses to internal and external environmental conditions. A recent article published by one of our very own fellow Duke students, Krishnan Patel, outlines the role of an eating disorder as a sort of dysregulation of this dynamic equilibrium, in which skewed self-perception and and food-based rewards create a psychopathological disorder characterized by periods of overindulgence in food without the existence of following purging behavior. A study by Schienle et al. in 2009 uses fMRI to attempt to establish a neurobiological relationship between the response to food stimuli and BED (binge-eating disorder) by monitoring the brain activation of patients while they are being presented with food. The results yielded the finding of increased activation in the medial orbito-frontal cortex in BED patients in response to food presentation. Furthermore, the medial OFC is thought to be responsible for the attribution of varying value to stimuli as well as multisensory integration; it then uses that information to make and execute decisions. However, a short-coming of this study is the fact that only a visual representation of food stimuli were utilized. Therefore the neural response very well might have been slightly off than the response that would be recorded from the presentation of actual food (although that presentation in itself would pose the issue of presenting multiple sensory stimuli including smell).
Thursday, February 24, 2011
The Underlying Mechanism of Binge Eating
As nearly all of my posts preceding this one have indicated, the brain exists in a constant state of equilibrium, striking a variable balance between responses to internal and external environmental conditions. A recent article published by one of our very own fellow Duke students, Krishnan Patel, outlines the role of an eating disorder as a sort of dysregulation of this dynamic equilibrium, in which skewed self-perception and and food-based rewards create a psychopathological disorder characterized by periods of overindulgence in food without the existence of following purging behavior. A study by Schienle et al. in 2009 uses fMRI to attempt to establish a neurobiological relationship between the response to food stimuli and BED (binge-eating disorder) by monitoring the brain activation of patients while they are being presented with food. The results yielded the finding of increased activation in the medial orbito-frontal cortex in BED patients in response to food presentation. Furthermore, the medial OFC is thought to be responsible for the attribution of varying value to stimuli as well as multisensory integration; it then uses that information to make and execute decisions. However, a short-coming of this study is the fact that only a visual representation of food stimuli were utilized. Therefore the neural response very well might have been slightly off than the response that would be recorded from the presentation of actual food (although that presentation in itself would pose the issue of presenting multiple sensory stimuli including smell).
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I thought this was really interesting, but like you said, I'd be much more interested in how the participants reacted to real food rather than a representative food stimuli. I really wonder how much of BED is brain-related and how much is a personal problem, and how the two interact.
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