Neural Correlates of Anti-appetite Medications: An fMRI Meta-analysis

Abstract

: Food craving is a health issue for a considerable proportion of the general population. Medications have been introduced to alleviate the craving or reduce the appetite via a neuropharmacological approach. However, the underlying cerebral processing of the medications was largely unknown. This study aimed to meta-analyze existing neuroimaging findings. We searched PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus to identify relevant publications. Original studies that reported brain imaging findings using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) were initially included. The reported coordinates of brain activation available from the studies were extracted and meta-analyzed with the activation likelihood estimation (ALE) approach via the software GingerALE. The overall analysis pooling data from 24 studies showed that the right claustrum and insula were the targeted sites of altered cerebral processing of food cues by the medications. Subgroup analysis pooling data from 11 studies showed that these sites had reduced activity level under medications compared to placebo. The location of this significant cluster partially overlapped with that attributable to affective value processing of food cue in a prior meta-analysis. No brain regions were found to have increased activity level by medications. These neural correlates may help explain the physiological effect of food consumption by anti-appetite and anti-obesity medications.

Neural correlates of food labels on brand, nature, and nutrition: An fMRI meta-analysis

“…Eating is an essential act of our everyday life, and it involves complicated cognitive appraisal and gustatory evaluation. Multiple meta-analyses have attempted to pool data across studies to identify brain regions responsible for primary tasting ( 1 – 3 ); for processing visual, taste, and odor food stimuli ( 4 ), food commercials ( 5 ), affect, intensity, and quality of food stimuli ( 6 ), tastants delivered with and without swallowing ( 7 ); for differential processing between hungry and satiated state ( 8 ), male and female ( 9 ), obese and normal weight ( 10 ); and regions targeted by anti-appetite medications ( 11 ). (For a more complete list of meta-analyses on taste and food, please refer to ( 12 )).…”

“…This might explain why some people would unintentionally drink shampoo or other poisonous home products. In fact, anti-appetite medications often targeted the gustatory processing at the insula ( 11 ). Besides, it was found that discrete regions of the prefrontal cortex, responsible for decision making and self-control, were activated in response to seeing popular brand logos of foods such as French fries versus corresponding organic brand logos ( 19 ).…”