Graduate and Postdoctoral Training

Shana Adise, Ph.D., postdoctoral fellow in psychiatry

(JANUARY 29, 2024) Shana Adise, Ph.D., postdoctoral fellow in psychiatry, led a study that is the first to show that children who have greater brain responses to food compared to money rewards are more likely to overeat when appealing foods are available, Modern Nurse reported.

In the study, recently published in the journal Appetite, researchers found that when certain regions of the brain reacted more strongly to being rewarded with food than being rewarded with money, those children were more likely to overeat, even when the child wasn’t hungry and regardless of if they were overweight or not.

Adise, who led the study while earning her doctorate at Penn State, said the results give insight into why some people may be more prone to overeating than others. The findings may also give clues on how to help prevent obesity at a younger age.

“We also found that the brain’s response to food compared to money was related to overeating regardless of how much the child weighed,” Adise said. “Specifically, we saw that increased brain responses in areas of the brain related to cognitive control and self-control when the children received food compared to money were associated with overeating.”

Adise added that this is important because it suggests there may be a way to identify brain responses that can predict the development of obesity in the future.