Tuesday, March 21, 2023
3/21/2023
Project Summary Deficits in executive control (EC), a critical set of cognitive abilities for directing attention and behavior, have been proposed as an important and modifiable contributor to obesity risk; however, the role of such deficits in the development of clinical weight problems is not well-understood. Existing research on EC and obesity lacks critical developmental and environmental context, precluding an understanding of when and how poor EC impacts obesity risk and limiting the ability to design developmentally-sensitive and targeted interventions addressing EC to prevent and treat clinical weight problems. Given that preschool and adolescence are both critical periods in the development of EC, and that adolescence is a time of increasing independence and obesity risk, a longitudinal study spanning preschool and adolescence is needed to explicate the impact of EC on weight trajectories within a rich developmental context. Further, the obesogenic environment that surrounds an adolescent is critical to understanding the EC-obesity relationship, yet studies exploring the role of EC in this broader environmental context are lacking. The long-term goal is to inform interventions targeting EC as a novel and modifiable risk factor for obesity at critical points in development. The objective of the proposed research is to explicate the impact of EC on weight trajectories and obesity-relevant behaviors in adolescence, in the context of a longitudinal study leveraging earlier EC data from the critical period of preschool. The proposed study also seeks to understand this relationship in the context of environmental risk by examining how the obesogenic environment interacts with EC to affect weight trajectories. The central hypothesis is that poor EC, at various points in development, will contribute to subsequent obesity risk and obesogenic behaviors in adolescence, and that this effect will be particularly pronounced for youth living in more obesogenic environments. The rationale is that a longitudinal study of EC and weight trajectories, within developmental and environmental contexts, would richly inform the timing and targets of potential interventions focusing on EC to prevent and treat obesity. The specific aims are to: (1) Determine the impact of EC development on weight trajectories in a longitudinal study spanning preschool to adolescence; (2) Determine the impact of EC development on adolescent obesity-relevant behaviors in this longitudinal study; and (3) Explore the role of the obesogenic environment as a moderator of the relationship between EC development and adolescent weight trajectories/obesogenic behaviors. The project is innovative in its unique leveraging of existing EC data from the sample and its combination of cognitive neuroscience and systems science to explore brain-environment interactions and their influence on health. The significance of this research is that it will yield an unprecedented understanding of the EC-obesity relationship within developmental and environmental contexts. These insights will inform the timing and targets of novel obesity interventions targeting both individual EC at key points in development and environmental factors that affect the demand for EC to enact healthy behaviors.
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