Neural Response to High and Low Energy Food Images in Anorexia Nervosa

To compare neural responses to high and low-energy food images in patients with Anorexia Nervosa (AN) and an age-matched Healthy Control (HC) group. 25 adolescents with AN and 21 HCs completed a diagnostic interview, self-report questionnaires and fMRI, during which they viewed food images evoking responses of disgust, happiness, or fear. Following whole brain analyses, neural responses in six regions of interest were examined in a series of between-group contrasts, across the three emotive categories. Compared to the HCs, people in the AN group showed increased responsivity to high-energy (1) disgust images in temporal lobe, frontal lobe, insula, and cerebellum anterior lobe; (2) fear images in occipital lobe, temporal, and frontal lobes and (3) happy images in frontal lobe, cerebellum anterior lobe, sub-lobar, and cuneus. More activity was observed in response to low-energy (1) disgust food images in the temporal lobe, frontal lobe, insula, cerebellum anterior and posterior lobes, parietal lobe, occipital lobe, and limbic lobe; (2) and happy food images in frontal lobes. Few correlations were found with levels of eating disorder symptoms. The findings highlight the emotional impact of diverse high and low-energy foods for people with AN. People without AN may have a better capacity to filter salient from non-salient information relating to the current task when viewing high energy foods. In summary, for those with AN, it would seem their ability to efficiently ‘sort-out’ information (especially information pertaining to disorder-relevant stimuli such as food images) to complete the task at hand, may be diminished.