Brain Area Controlling Addiction-Like Food Cravings Found

Many people in the United States display eating behaviors that make researchers think about addicts craving for their drugs. A study conducted on this subgroup of the population demonstrated that the brain areas involved in underlying this behavior are the same that make addicts crave their fix.

The new research was conducted using a brain imaging technique called functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), which is capable of seeing the flow of blood through various areas of the human brain.

This allows researchers to track which regions of the cortex are activated during any specific action or thought process. When applied to people with addict-like eating behavior, the technique revealed that this type of over-eaters and drug addicts shared the same activation patterns in the same brain regions.

A key element in their seemingly-insatiable desire to eat is a malfunctioning reward pathway in the brain, which is overstimulated when they eat. The same type of reaction is elicited by drugs too.

When they are not eating, these people experience much more intense cravings than the average individuals. These correlations were derived from a study of women ranging from a small to a very high body-mass index (BMI).

Details of the work were already published in the early online issue of the medical journal Archives of General Psychiatry, and will appear in the August print issue of the same magazine as well.

The investigation was conducted by experts at the Yale University, who were coordinated by lead author and PhD student Ashley Gearhardt. At the beginning of the experiments, the 48 test subjects (all healthy women) were surveyed for food addiction using a scale developed by the Yale team leader.

“Similar patterns of neural activation are implicated in addictive-like eating behavior and substance abuse and dependence,” Gearhardt said in the journal entry.

“Food and drug use both result in dopamine release in mesolimbic regions [of the brain] and the degree of release correlates with subjective reward from both food and drug use,” she went on to say.

“These findings support the theory that compulsive food consumption may be driven in part by an enhanced anticipation of the rewarding properties of food,” the team explains further.

“Similarly, addicted individuals are more likely to be physiologically, psychologically, and behaviorally reactive to substance-related cues,” they conclude, quoted by PsychCentral.