To Eat or Not To Eat: The Neurobiological Substrates Guiding Maladaptive Decision-Making in Obesity - Abstract
Obesity is an increasingly prevalent disease characterized by excess food consumption despite adverse consequences that include a myriad of life-threatening health conditions. Current strategies to treat this condition rarely induce long-term weight loss in part because they do not address the psychological drive to consume excess food. Understanding the mechanisms of decision-making processes that ultimately underlie overeating may lead to a better understanding and treatment of this complex disease. In this review, we summarize functional studies demonstrating the neurological circuits that encode discrete facets of decision-making and discuss how these processes may be abnormal in obesity. Our analysis draws striking parallels between the phenotypes and underlying neurological mechanisms of obesity and drug addiction. Finally, because functional changes in brain activity are reflective of underlying molecular events that influence neuronal plasticity, we suggest an epigenetic model for obesity that has proven relevance in mediating neuroplastic and behavioral changes in the context of substance abuse.