Emotional overeating is characterized by an excessive food intake in the context of intense emotional situations, such as acute stress one. Emotional overeating, as a behavioral trait, can increase the risk of to develop eating disorders or eating-related diseases, such as metabolic syndrome, obesity, type-2 diabetes. Recently, imaging modalities, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and electro-encephalography (EEG), have been adapted in order to perform neurofeedback consisting on presenting the brain activity instantaneously to the participant, that give him the possibility to modify this activity by his own mean. Neurofeedback has already shown some efficacy, either with explicit or implicit instruction.
Compared with functional MRI (fMRI), functional near infra-red spectroscopy (fNIRS) is easy to handle, less expensive, and does not require a lying position. fNIRS is consequently more adapted for repeated acquisitions. Neurofeedback has already shown some promising results for neurological and psychiatric diseases. For mental states and emotion regulation, neurofeedback targeting the prefrontal cortex (PFC) has also shown promising outcomes. In this project, the investigators want to assess the effect of neurofeedback targeting the dorsolateral PFC (dlPFC) in a population of young adult women presenting emotional overeating. The investigators aim to improve the cognitive control and to reduce the episodes of emotional overeating in order to prevent the occurrence of subsequent pathologies.
The intervention effect will be characterized with: (i) fMRI in order to evaluate the effect on cognitive control (with resting state fMRI or rsMRI) and on the reward system; (II) questionaries directly and one month after intervention in order to assess the behavioral effect.
Besides an expected effect on emotional overeating, the investigators will evaluate whether an improvement of cognitive control can also promote positive effect on other behavioral traits that could lead to some pathologies such as food addiction.
As a prerequisite to this study on emotional overeating (study B), the investigators will firstly validate on healthy subjects (study A) a reward anticipation fMRI task, which will be further used in study A in order to characterized the effect of neurofeedback on the reward system.
Minimum age : 18 Years
Maximum Age : 50 Years
Sex : women or men
Normal Body Mass Index (18.5-25),
Implantable cardiac pacemaker or defibrillator;
Neurosurgical clips;
Cochlear implants;
Neural or peripheral stimulator;
Parallel
Neurofeedback with functional near infra-red spectroscopy
Devicethe neurofeedback protocol will last 15 minutes per session, and during each session, the volunteer will have to increase the brain activity of his/her dorsolateral prefrontal cortex using a visual gauge representing the "activity level" of his/her own dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. No specific instructions will be given to the volunteer so that he/she can develop his/her own internal strategy to increase this "activity level".
Sham Neurofeedback
Devicethe participants will receive the same instruction but will be shown a random signal
oral microbiota collection
Other interventionan examination and oral swab for oral microbiota analysis will be performed by a dentist
Questionnaires
Other interventionquestionnaires for pre-intervention behavioral characterization
resting-state fMRI
Devicecharacterize the brain function of volunteers by resting-state fMRI
Electro gastrogram
DeviceVolunteers will also be equipped with an MRI-compatible electro-gastrogram device to correlate gastric signals with brain activity during rsMRI acquisition.
Emotional Stroop task
Behavioralan emotional Stroop task adapted to food and body image representation
Delay discount task
BehavioralDelay discount task
Change in cortico-striatal connectivity
Significant change in cortico-striatal connectivity as determined with resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging correlation coefficient between the first magnetic resonance imaging and the last magnetic resonance imaging visit
Validate during a pilot study in a healthy population without emotional hyperphagia a functional MRI task of reward anticipation (Monetary and Food Incentive Delay task) to characterize the effect of NeuroFeedback.
healthy volunteers Statistical increase of brain responses (BOLD signal variation) in motivation and reward brain regions determined with fMRI task to reward anticipation (Monetary and Food Incentive Delay task)
Validate a NeuroFeedback. approach targeting the nucleus accumbens by fMRI during sweet taste stimulation
Statistical increase of fMRI BOLD responses in nucleus accumbens to sweet taste oral stimulation
Statistical decreased in the score on the Emotional Overeating Questionnaire, evaluating emotional overeating, after vs before neurofeedback
healthy volunteers with emotional overeating number of "emotions" driving equal or more than 6 days of overeating in a month, from 0 to 5
Evaluate by brain imaging (Monetary and Food Incentive Delay task in fMRI and basal cerebral perfusion) and behavioral questionnaires the effect of neurofeedback
healthy volunteers with emotional overeating Neurofeedback will statistically decrease brain response (BOLD signal variation) in motivation and reward brain regions determined with fMRI task of reward anticipation for food (Monetary and Food Incentive Delay task) Neurofeedback will increase basal cerebral perfusion in prefrontal brain regions. Neurofeedback can modify statistically the outcome of behavioral questionaries (increase of controlling feeling during neurofeedback, from 1 : no control feeling, to 10: high control feeling)
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Rennes University Hospital
Lead sponsor
Institut National de Recherche pour l'Agriculture, l'Alimentation et l'Environnement
Collaborator
