Abstract
The most common cause for obesity is a positive energy balance, i.e. more energy is being consumed than is expended. The rise in obesity rates cannot be explained on the basis of our obesogenic environment alone, because large interindividual differences in weight status exist between people. Therefore, the cause is most probably to be found in an interaction between individual behaviour and our changed environment. This warrants the investigation of the brain’s role in the development and maintenance of obesity that indeed has become a growing field in the neurosciences. This article will give an overview about the findings in neuroimaging associated with human obesity. Further, this article will elucidate the relationship between common genetic variation, eating behaviour and brain structure in the context of obesity. Finally, important open questions in the field will be summarised.
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Acknowledgments
This work of was supported by the IFB Adiposity Diseases, Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), Germany, FKZ: 01E01001 (http://www.bmbf.de) and the German Research Foundation (DFG) (http://www.dfg.de), within the framework of the CRC 1052 ‘Obesity Mechanisms’, projects A1 and A5.
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Conflict of interest. A. Horstmann and A. Villringer state that there are no conflicts of interest.
The accompanying manuscript does not include studies on humans or animals.
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Horstmann, A., Villringer, A. The brain’s role in human obesity. e-Neuroforum 4, 79–84 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13295-013-0048-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13295-013-0048-y