Dopamine, Obesity and Age Appear to Influence Preference For Sweet Foods

Summary: Researchers believe they might have identified a new abnormality in the relationship between dopamine and response to food in those with obesity.

Source: WUSTL.

Finding may reveal dysfunction in the brains of individuals with obesity.

As young people reach adulthood, their preferences for sweet foods typically decline. But for people with obesity, new research suggests that the drop-off may not be as steep and that the brain’s reward system operates differently in obese people than in thinner people, which may play a role in this phenomenon.

The new findings are published online June 15 in the journal Diabetes.

“We believe we may have identified a new abnormality in the relationship between reward response to food and dopamine in the brains of individuals with obesity,” said the study’s first author, M. Yanina Pepino, PhD, an assistant professor of medicine. “In general, people grow less fond of sweet things as they move from adolescence into adulthood. Also, as we age, we have fewer dopamine receptors in a brain structure, called the striatum, that is critical to the reward system. We find that both younger age and fewer dopamine receptors are associated with a higher preference for sweets in those of normal weight. However, in people with obesity, that was not the case in our study.”

The researchers studied 20 subjects with healthy weights and compared them with 24 people considered obese, each of whom had a body mass index of 30 or higher. The study volunteers were 20 to 40 years old.

The participants received drinks containing varying levels of sugar to determine the degrees of sweetness each individual preferred. The researchers then conducted positron emission tomography (PET) scans to identify dopamine receptors linked to rewards in each person’s brain. Dopamine is the main chemical in the brain that makes us feel good. The PET scans revealed that although there was a relationship between the dopamine receptors, preference for sweet things and age in lean people, that pattern didn’t hold true in the brains of obese people.

“We found disparities in preference for sweets between individuals, and we also found individual variations in dopamine receptors — some people have high levels and some low — but when we looked at how those things go together, the general trend in people of normal weight was that having fewer dopamine receptors was associated with a higher preference for sweets,” said co-investigator Tamara Hershey, PhD, a professor of psychiatry, of neurology and of radiology.

Image shows a woman eating chocolate.
The relationship between their ages, sweetness preferences and dopamine receptors didn’t follow the pattern seen in people who weighed less. NeuroscienceNews.com image is adapted from the WUSTL press release.

But that wasn’t true in the obese subjects. The relationship between their ages, sweetness preferences and dopamine receptors didn’t follow the pattern seen in people who weighed less.

Pepino and Hershey explained that it’s possible that insulin resistance or some other metabolic change linked to obesity could contribute to the absence of those associations in the obese group. Although none of the obese study participants had diabetes, some had higher blood glucose and insulin concentrations, and some were becoming resistant to insulin. The researchers believe those factors could have altered the brain’s response to sweet things.

“There is a relationship between insulin resistance and the brain’s reward system, so that might have something to do with what we saw in obese subjects,” Hershey said. “What’s clear is that extra body fat can exert effects not only in how we metabolize food but how our brains perceive rewards when we eat that food, particularly when it’s something sweet.”

About this neuroscience research article

Funding: This work was supported by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), grant numbers R01 DK085575, P30 DK056341, and the Clinical and Translational Science Award UL1 TR000448.

Source: Jim Dryden – WUSTL
Image Source: This NeuroscienceNews.com image is in the public domain.
Original Research: Abstract for “Sweet dopamine: Sucrose preferences relate differentially to striatal D2 receptor binding and age in obesity” by Marta Y. Pepino, Sarah A. Eisenstein, Allison N. Bischoff, Samuel Klein, Stephen M. Moerlein, Joel S. Perlmutter, Kevin J. Black, and Tamara Hershey in Diabetes. Published online June 15 016 doi:10.2337/db16-0407

Cite This NeuroscienceNews.com Article

[cbtabs][cbtab title=”MLA”]WUSTL. “Dopamine, Obesity and Age Appear to Influence Preference For Sweet Foods.” NeuroscienceNews. NeuroscienceNews, 15 June 2016.
<https://neurosciencenews.com/age-obesity-dopamine-sweet-food-4485/>.[/cbtab][cbtab title=”APA”]WUSTL. (2016, June 15). Dopamine, Obesity and Age Appear to Influence Preference For Sweet Foods. NeuroscienceNew. Retrieved June 15, 2016 from https://neurosciencenews.com/age-obesity-dopamine-sweet-food-4485/[/cbtab][cbtab title=”Chicago”]WUSTL. “Dopamine, Obesity and Age Appear to Influence Preference For Sweet Foods.” https://neurosciencenews.com/age-obesity-dopamine-sweet-food-4485/ (accessed June 15, 2016).[/cbtab][/cbtabs]


Abstract

Sweet dopamine: Sucrose preferences relate differentially to striatal D2 receptor binding and age in obesity

Alterations in dopaminergic circuitry play a critical role in food reward and may contribute to susceptibility to obesity. Ingestion of sweets releases dopamine in striatum, and both sweet preferences and striatal D2 receptors (D2R) decline with age and may be altered in obesity. Understanding the relationships between these variables and the impact of obesity on these relationships may reveal insight into the neurobiological basis of sweet preferences. We evaluated sucrose preferences, perception of sweetness intensity, and striatal D2R binding potential (D2R BPND) using PET with a D2R selective radioligand insensitive to endogenous dopamine, (N-[11C] methyl)benperidol, in 20 subjects without obesity (BMI 22.6 ±2.5 kg/m2; age 28.3 ±5.4y) and 24 subjects with obesity (BMI 40.3±5.0 kg/m2; age 31.2±6.3y). Groups had similar sucrose preferences, sweetness intensity perception, striatal D2R BPND, and age-related D2R BPND declines. However, both striatal D2R BPND and age correlated with sucrose preferences in subjects without obesity, explaining 52% of their variance in sucrose preference. In contrast, these associations were absent in the obese group. In conclusion, the age-related decline in D2R was not linked to the age-related decline in sweetness preferences, suggesting other, as yet unknown, mechanisms play a role, and that these mechanisms are disrupted in obesity.

“Sweet dopamine: Sucrose preferences relate differentially to striatal D2 receptor binding and age in obesity” by Marta Y. Pepino, Sarah A. Eisenstein, Allison N. Bischoff, Samuel Klein, Stephen M. Moerlein, Joel S. Perlmutter, Kevin J. Black, and Tamara Hershey in Diabetes. Published online June 15 016 doi:10.2337/db16-0407

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