Monika Stojek, PhD, Assoc. Prof. published an article ‘A Pilot Randomized Control Trial Testing a Smartphone-Delivered Food Attention Retraining Program in Adolescent Girls with Overweight or Obesity’ in co-authorship with researchers from several centres in the USA. The article was published in the journal Nutrients.
The article describes the results of a study in which overweight teenagers used a phone app to alter their eating habits through changing their attention bias towards food.
68 teenage girls participated in a neuroimaging session using magnetoencephalography and completed a task measuring their level of attentional bias towards images depicting food. In addition, they took part in a laboratory meal in which they had unlimited access to a variety of foods and their caloric intake was measured. Half of the participants were then assigned to an intervention group in which, for two weeks, three times a day, they used a phone app that aimed to change their focus from food-related to non-food-related stimuli; half of the participants used the app with the same frequency, but their attention was not modified.
The results showed that adolescents who were subjected to the intervention displayed less attentional bias toward food, displayed less activation in reward-related brain regions in response to food-related stimuli, and ate less food during the laboratory meal, compared to those in the control group.
The results of the study are promising but should be replicated in a larger sample group.
