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Adolescent Vulnerability to Heightened Emotional Reactivity and Anxiety After Brief Exposure to an Obesogenic Diet.

ABSTRACT: Background:Emerging evidence demonstrates that diet-induced obesity disrupts corticolimbic circuits underlying emotional regulation. Studies directed at understanding how obesity alters brain and behavior are easily confounded by a myriad of complications related to obesity. This study investigated the early neurobiological stress response triggered by an obesogenic diet. Furthermore, this study directly determined the combined impact of a short-term obesogenic diet and adolescence on critical behavioral and molecular substrates implicated in emotion regulation and stress. Methods:Adolescent (postnatal day 31) or adult (postnatal day 81) Lewis rats were fed for 1 week with an experimental Western-like high-saturated fat diet (WD, 41% kcal from fat) or a matched control diet (CD, 13% kcal from fat). We used the acoustic fear-potentiated startle (FPS) paradigm to determine the effects of the WD on cued fear conditioning and fear extinction. We used c-Fos mapping to determine the functional influence of the diet and stress on corticolimbic circuits. Results:We report that 1-week WD consumption was sufficient to induce fear extinction deficits in adolescent rats, but not in adult rats. We identify fear-induced alterations in corticolimbic neuronal activation and demonstrate increased prefrontal cortex CRHR1 messenger RNA (mRNA) levels in the rats that consumed the WD. Conclusion:Our findings demonstrate that short-term consumption of an obesogenic diet during adolescence heightens behavioral and molecular vulnerabilities associated with risk for anxiety and stress-related disorders. Given that fear extinction promotes resilience and that fear extinction principles are the foundation of psychological treatments for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), understanding how obesogenic environments interact with the adolescent period to affect the acquisition and expression of fear extinction memories is of tremendous clinical relevance.

SUBMITTER: Vega-Torres JD

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7338851 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Adolescent Vulnerability to Heightened Emotional Reactivity and Anxiety After Brief Exposure to an Obesogenic Diet.

Vega-Torres Julio D JD Azadian Matine M Rios-Orsini Raul A RA Reyes-Rivera Arsenio L AL Ontiveros-Angel Perla P Figueroa Johnny D JD

Frontiers in neuroscience 20200630

<h4>Background</h4>Emerging evidence demonstrates that diet-induced obesity disrupts corticolimbic circuits underlying emotional regulation. Studies directed at understanding how obesity alters brain and behavior are easily confounded by a myriad of complications related to obesity. This study investigated the early neurobiological stress response triggered by an obesogenic diet. Furthermore, this study directly determined the combined impact of a short-term obesogenic diet and adolescence on cr ...[more]

PMID: 32694970

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Project description:Social anxiety disorder is thought to involve emotional hyperreactivity, cognitive distortions, and ineffective emotion regulation. While the neural bases of emotional reactivity to social stimuli have been described, the neural bases of emotional reactivity and cognitive regulation during social and physical threat, and their relationship to social anxiety symptom severity, have yet to be investigated.To investigate behavioral and neural correlates of emotional reactivity and cognitive regulation in patients and controls during processing of social and physical threat stimuli.Participants were trained to implement cognitive-linguistic regulation of emotional reactivity induced by social (harsh facial expressions) and physical (violent scenes) threat while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging and providing behavioral ratings of negative emotion experience.Academic psychology department.Fifteen adults with social anxiety disorder and 17 demographically matched healthy controls.Blood oxygen level-dependent signal and negative emotion ratings.Behaviorally, patients reported greater negative emotion than controls during social and physical threat but showed equivalent reduction in negative emotion following cognitive regulation. Neurally, viewing social threat resulted in greater emotion-related neural responses in patients than controls, with social anxiety symptom severity related to activity in a network of emotion- and attention-processing regions in patients only. Viewing physical threat produced no between-group differences. Regulation during social threat resulted in greater cognitive and attention regulation-related brain activation in controls compared with patients. Regulation during physical threat produced greater cognitive control-related response (ie, right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) in patients compared with controls.Compared with controls, patients demonstrated exaggerated negative emotion reactivity and reduced cognitive regulation-related neural activation, specifically for social threat stimuli. These findings help to elucidate potential neural mechanisms of emotion regulation that might serve as biomarkers for interventions for social anxiety disorder.

Dataset Information

Adolescent Vulnerability to Heightened Emotional Reactivity and Anxiety After Brief Exposure to an Obesogenic Diet.

Publications

Adolescent Vulnerability to Heightened Emotional Reactivity and Anxiety After Brief Exposure to an Obesogenic Diet.

Similar Datasets

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