Oxytocin enhances cognitive control of food craving in women

• Published in: Human brain mapping 2016-12, Vol.37 (12), p.4276-4285
• Main Authors: Striepens, Nadine, Schröter, Franziska, Stoffel-Wagner, Birgit, Maier, Wolfgang, Hurlemann, René, Scheele, Dirk
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Administration, Intranasal; Adult; Analysis of Variance; Brain - diagnostic imaging; Brain - drug effects; Brain - physiology; Brain Mapping; Cognition - drug effects; craving; Craving - drug effects; Craving - physiology; Double-Blind Method; Eating - drug effects; Eating - physiology; emotion regulation; Executive Function - drug effects; Executive Function - physiology; Female; Food; functional magnetic resonance imaging; Homeostasis - drug effects; Homeostasis - physiology; Humans; Imagination - drug effects; Imagination - physiology; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Neural Pathways - diagnostic imaging; Neural Pathways - drug effects; Neural Pathways - physiology; oxytocin; Oxytocin - metabolism; Oxytocin - pharmacology; Psychotropic Drugs - pharmacology; women
• ISSN: 1065-9471; 1097-0193
• DOI: 10.1002/hbm.23308

In developed countries, obesity has become an epidemic resulting in enormous health care costs for society and serious medical complications for individuals. The homeostatic regulation of food intake is critically dependent on top‐down control of reward‐driven food craving. There is accumulating evidence from animal studies that the neuropeptide oxytocin (OXT) is involved in regulating hunger states and eating behavior, but whether OXT also contributes to cognitive control of food craving in humans is still unclear. We conducted a counter‐balanced, double‐blind, within‐subject, pharmacological magnetic resonance imaging experiment involving 31 healthy women who received 24 IU of intranasal OXT or placebo and were scanned twice while they were exposed to pictures of palatable food. The participants were instructed either to imagine the immediate consumption or to cognitively control the urge to eat the food. Our results show a trend that OXT specifically reduced food craving in the cognitive control condition. On the neural level, these findings were paralleled by an increase of activity in the middle and superior frontal gyrus, precuneus, and cingulate cortex under OXT. Interestingly, the behavioral OXT effect correlated with the OXT‐induced changes in the prefrontal cortex and precuneus. Collectively, the present study provides first evidence that OXT plays a key role in the cognitive regulation of food craving in women by strengthening activity in a broad neurocircuitry implicated in top‐down control and self‐referential processing. Hum Brain Mapp 37:4276–4285, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.