Responsivity to food stimuli in obese and lean binge eaters using functional MRI

Functional neuroimaging was employed to study 10 obese and 10 lean healthy young right-handed women, divided equally into binge and non-binge eaters. Subjects were presented with visual and auditory stimuli of binge type foods, non-binge type foods, and non-food stimuli in the fMRI scanner. Brain areas activated by both the visual and auditory stimuli across all individual subjects within a particular group was observed only for the binge food stimuli in the obese binge eaters, in the right premotor area, involved in planning of motor behavior. For four of the five obese binge eaters, the activation was in the ventral premotor cortex adjacent to the oral region, and may reflect past or concurrent motor planning about eating binge foods. Because a random effects group analysis has not yet been completed, this should be considered a preliminary report.