Working Memory in Overweight Children With and Without Loss of Control Eating
Public ClinicalTrials.gov record NCT04117542. Field values are reproduced from the official study page; the official ClinicalTrials.gov record remains the source of truth for eligibility, enrollment, and contact information.
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Official title
Neural Substrates of Context-dependent Working Memory in Youth With Overweight/Obesity and Loss of Control Eating
Brief summary
Reproduced verbatim from the official ClinicalTrials.gov record. Not medical advice.
Loss of control (LOC) eating in children is associated with multiple physical and mental health impairments, including obesity and eating disorders. Little is known about the developmental neurobiology of LOC, which is crucial to specifying its pathophysiology and the development of effective preventive interventions. Individual differences in working memory (WM) appear to be related to LOC eating and excess weight status in youth, but the specificity and neural correlates of these individual differences are unclear. Failure to adequately understand the nature of associations between WM and eating behavior in children with overweight/obesity limits the development of appropriately-targeted, neuro-developmentally informed interventions addressing problematic eating and related weight gain in youth. To close this clinical research gap, the current study proposes to investigate the context-dependence of WM impairment and its neural correlates in children with concomitant overweight/ obesity and LOC eating as compared to their overweight/obese peers. Specific aims are to investigate: 1)WM performance in youth with LOC eating relative to overweight/obese controls during recalls in the context of food-related versus neutral distractors; and 2) neural activation patterns during WM performance across both food-related and neutral stimuli. We hypothesize that, relative to their overweight/obese peers, youth with LOC eating will show 1) more errors and slower response times during recalls involving food-related vs. neutral distractors, and fewer errors and faster response times during recalls involving food-related vs. neutral targets; 2) increased activation in prefrontal regions during WM performance across stimuli types relative to overweight/obese controls, and 3) even greater activation in the context of food-related versus neutral distractors. The proposed study is the first to use state-of-the-science neuroimaging methodology to clarify the relations between WM and LOC eating, with strong potential to advance understanding of the associations among executive functioning, excess weight status, and eating pathology, and inform the development of interventions (e.g., WM training) to alleviate their cumulative personal and societal burden.
Study identification
- NCT ID
- NCT04117542
- Recruitment status
- Completed
- Study type
- Observational
- Phase
- Not listed
- Enrollment
- 30 participants
Conditions and interventions
Conditions
Eligibility (public fields only)
- Age range
- 10 Years to 17 Years
- Sex
- All
- Healthy volunteers
- Not listed
This page does not interpret eligibility. Detailed inclusion and exclusion criteria are on the official ClinicalTrials.gov record.
Study timeline
- Start date
- Oct 17, 2018
- Primary completion
- Dec 30, 2020
- Completion
- Dec 30, 2020
- Last update posted
- Feb 22, 2021
2018 – 2020
United States locations
- U.S. sites
- 1
- U.S. states
- 1
- U.S. cities
- 1
| Facility | City | State | ZIP | Site status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Weight Control & Diabetes Research Center | Providence | Rhode Island | 02903 | — |
Site contact phone numbers, emails, and investigator names are intentionally not displayed here. Open the official ClinicalTrials.gov record for site contact information.
About this trial record page
- What this page shows
- Public field values for ClinicalTrials.gov record NCT04117542, including study identification, conditions, interventions, eligibility (age, sex, healthy volunteer), timeline, and U.S. site list.
- What this page does not do
- No medical advice, eligibility judgments, treatment recommendations, study quality scoring, or AI-generated medical summaries. No site contact phone numbers, emails, or investigator names.
- Where the data comes from
- Sourced from the official ClinicalTrials.gov public API. The official record is the source of truth.
- Last refresh
- Last update posted Feb 22, 2021 · Synced Sep 5, 2026
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Open the official record
The complete protocol, eligibility criteria, and contact information for NCT04117542 live on ClinicalTrials.gov.