Comparison of women with high vs. low food addiction tendency: a pilot study with voxel-based morphometry

Background: The concept of ‘food addiction’ (FA) posits that highly processed food with added fat and/or refined carbohydrates is capable of triggering addictive-like eating behavior. FA may be one possible phenotype in obesity. Methods: The present voxel-based morphometry (VBM) study compared data from three groups of women. One group scored high on the Yale Food Addiction Scale (YFAS) and was overweight (n= 21), whereas the two other groups had low YFAS scores and were either overweight (n = 21) or normal-weight (n = 21). Results: Overweight women with high YFAS scores had less grey matter volume (GMV) in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) than overweight women with low FA tendency, who in turn had less GMV in the IFG than the normal-weight group. The IFG is involved in response inhibition, which is relevant for the control of appetite and food intake. In the group with high FA tendency, the frequency of binge episodes was substantially correlated with the YFAS scores, and 11 women of this group were diagnosed with binge-eating disorder (BED). The association between IFG volume and YFAS scores was not statistically significant anymore when controlling for the effect of binge frequency as revealed by partial correlation analysis. Conclusion: This VBM study revealed an association between reported FA tendency and a neural correlate of disinhibited eating. Future studies with bigger sample sizes are needed in order to demonstrate that FA is sufficiently different from existing conditions (e.g., BED) to warrant classification as a distinct disease phenotype.