Sonja Yokum

TL;DR: Similar patterns of neural activation are implicated in addictive-like eating behavior and substance dependence: elevated activation in reward circuitry in response to food cues and reduced activation of inhibitory regions in responseto food intake.

TL;DR: Functional magnetic resonance imaging is used to investigate neural activations during a food-specific go/no-go task in adolescent girls ranging from lean to obese and suggests that hypofunctioning of inhibitory control regions and increased response of food reward regions are related to elevated weight.

TL;DR: Results indicate that overweight is related to greater attentional bias to food cues and that youth who show elevated reward circuitry responsivity during food cue exposure are at increased risk for weight gain.

TL;DR: Testing whether overeating leads to reduced striatal responsivity to palatable food intake in humans using repeated-measures functional magnetic resonance imaging indicated that women who gained weight over a 6 month period showed a reduction in striatal response toPalatable food consumption relative to weight-stable women.

TL;DR: This novel prospective fMRI study indicates that responsivity of reward circuitry to food increases risk for future weight gain, but that genes that impact dopamine signaling capacity moderate the predictive effects, suggesting two qualitatively distinct pathways to unhealthy weight gain based on genetic risk.