Theoretical work suggests that obesity is related to enhanced incentive salience of food cues. However, evidence from both behavioral and neuroimaging studies on the topic is mixed. In this work we review the literature on cue reactivity in obesity and perform a preregistered meta-analysis of studies investigating effects of obesity on brain responses to passive food pictures viewing. Further, we examine whether age influences brain responses to food cues in obesity. In the meta-analysis we included 13 studies of children and adults that investigated group differences (obese vs. lean) in responses to food vs. non-food pictures viewing. While we found no significant differences in the overall meta-analysis, we show that age significantly influences brain response differences to food cues in the left insula and the left fusiform gyrus. In the left insula, obese vs. lean brain differences in response to food cues decreased with age, while in the left fusiform gyrus the pattern was opposite. Our results suggest that there is little evidence for obesity-related differences in responses to food cues and that such differences might be mediated by additional factors that are often not considered.

中文翻译：

---

肥胖与视觉食物线索的神经反应增强有关吗？回顾和荟萃分析。


理论工作表明，肥胖与食物线索的激励显着性增强有关。然而，关于该主题的行为和神经影像学研究的证据是混杂的。在这项工作中，我们回顾了有关肥胖线索反应性的文献，并对肥胖对大脑对被动食物图片观看反应的影响的研究进行了预先注册的荟萃分析。此外，我们还研究了年龄是否会影响肥胖中大脑对食物线索的反应。在荟萃分析中，我们纳入了 13 项针对儿童和成人的研究，这些研究调查了观看食物与非食物图片时的群体差异（肥胖与瘦）。虽然我们发现总体荟萃分析没有显着差异，但我们表明年龄显着影响左侧岛叶和左侧梭状回的大脑对食物线索的反应差异。在左侧岛叶中，肥胖与瘦弱的大脑对食物线索的反应差异随着年龄的增长而减小，而在左侧梭状回中，这种模式则相反。我们的结果表明，几乎没有证据表明肥胖相关的对食物线索的反应存在差异，并且这种差异可能是由通常未被考虑的其他因素介导的。