The Role of Altered Nutrient Partitioning in Food Reward
Public ClinicalTrials.gov record NCT05200845. 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.
Data is sourced from official ClinicalTrials.gov public API records. Always review the official ClinicalTrials.gov record for the latest information.
Brief summary
Reproduced verbatim from the official ClinicalTrials.gov record. Not medical advice.
Obesity remains a public health epidemic despite substantial advances in treatment strategies and therapies in the last decade. Effective strategies to support maintenance of improved metabolic health and reduced body weight are still needed. Signals from the gut to the brain are important in regulating metabolism and energy balance and have been linked with food reward and preference in metabolically healthy individuals with normal body mass index. In particular, post-ingestive signaling related to glucose metabolism has been linked with food reward and preference. However, not much is known about how these gut and brain signals interact to influence eating behaviors in states of obesity or altered metabolic health. In addition, evidence in rodent models and human studies indicates obesity is associated with a blunted brain response to foods compared with normal body weight. However, whether altered nutrient utilization, termed metabolic inflexibility, influences the relationship between obesity and food reward has yet to be studied. The overall objective of this proof-of-concept pilot study is to assess the feasibility of measuring reward response following a flavor-nutrient conditioning paradigm across the normal to obese body mass index (BMI) range and in states of altered metabolic health. The aims of this study are: 1) to determine whether differences in reinforcement learning/flavor-nutrient conditioning of carbohydrate can be measured across the body mass index range; and 2) to determine the feasibility of assessing metabolic flexibility and whether a relationship between metabolic flexibility and calorie-predictive reward can be detected.
Study identification
- NCT ID
- NCT05200845
- Recruitment status
- Completed
- Study type
- Interventional
- Phase
- Not applicable
- Enrollment
- 20 participants
Conditions and interventions
Conditions
Interventions
- Conditioned Stimulus + (CS+): Flavored beverage solution with 75 calories of sucrose Other
- Conditioned Stimulus - (CS-): Flavored beverage solution with sweetness-matched sucralose Other
- High-Fat Test Meal Inside a Metabolic Chamber Other
- High-Carbohydrate Test Meal Inside a Metabolic Chamber Other
- fMRI Scan Other
Other
Eligibility (public fields only)
- Age range
- 18 Years to 45 Years
- Sex
- All
- Healthy volunteers
- Accepts healthy volunteers
This page does not interpret eligibility. Detailed inclusion and exclusion criteria are on the official ClinicalTrials.gov record.
Study timeline
- Start date
- Feb 22, 2022
- Primary completion
- May 31, 2023
- Completion
- May 31, 2023
- Last update posted
- Sep 7, 2025
2022 – 2023
United States locations
- U.S. sites
- 1
- U.S. states
- 1
- U.S. cities
- 1
| Facility | City | State | ZIP | Site status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at Virginia Tech Carilion | Roanoke | Virginia | 24016 | — |
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 NCT05200845, 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 Sep 7, 2025 · Synced Sep 2, 2026
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Open the official record
The complete protocol, eligibility criteria, and contact information for NCT05200845 live on ClinicalTrials.gov.