Poster #19 - Getting to the Heart-Food Craving: Cardiac Variability Predicts Food Craving in Adolescents

• In Event: 1-169 - Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Section - Biological Processes: Psychophysiology

Integrative Statement

Background: Obesity continues to be a pressing public health concern (Ng et al., 2014). With increasing obesity in youth, research unpacking self-regulatory factors that drive eating behavior is needed. One such factor, food craving refers to an urgent desire for a specific food, and is strongly related with self-regulation (Delahanty, Meigs, Hayden, Williamson, & Nathan, 2002). One biological marker of self-regulation is heart-rate variability (HRV). HRV refers to the variation of the interbeat intervals of the heart and is driven by the sympathetic and parasympathetic autonomic nervous systems. High frequency (HF) (.15-.4Hz) heart rate variability is known as an index for parasympathetic activity. HF has been positively associated with self-regulation (Holzman & Bridgett, 2017) and negatively associated with food craving in adults (Meule, Freund, Skirde, Vögele, & Kübler, 2012). Besides HF, Low frequency (LF) (0.04 – 0.15Hz) is thought to to reflect sympathetic and parasympathetic activities, while very low frequency (VLF) (0.0033–0.04 Hz) is related with metabolic and hormonal influences. LF and VLF are less studied. Few if any published studies of HRV and food craving exist in younger populations—especially in adolescents, when important pubertal development occurs.

Method: Participants in this study were part of a larger study of 160 adolescents (Blood et al., 2015; Wu et al., 2017). Data were collected across two visits. At visit 1, participants completed the 39-item Food Craving Questionnaire-Trait (FCQ-T) (Cepeda-I~enito, Gleaves, Wilua~s, & Erath, 2000). At visit 2, two weeks later, electrocardiogram (ECG) was recorded from the participants during a 7-minute resting state assessment with a sampling rate of 1000 Hz. Relative power of each frequency was calculated. Correlations between food craving and HF, LF, VLF were examined. Then linear regressions were conducted using FCQ-T as the dependent variable, and HF, LF, VLF as the predictors respectively while taking into account of sex, age and puberty.

Results: Both HF and VLF significantly correlated with food craving (r = -.219, p = .012, r = .206, p = .018, respectively), and LF did not (r = .085, p = .331), (Figure 1). We used linear regression to predict food craving. After taking sex, age and puberty into account, HF and VLF both significantly predicted food craving (Table 1, Table 2).

Conclusion: Consistent with previous work in adults, HF is negatively associated with food craving in adolescents. This finding supports the idea that lower HF reflects poorer self-regulation and may contribute to higher food craving. LF was not a significant predictor of craving. VLF was positively associated with food craving. Previous research on VLF found a positive association with physical activity and metabolism, but this work is largely limited to patients with cardiac issues (Usui & Nishida, 2015). We speculate that higher VLF reflects a higher level of physical activity (Drenowatz et al., 2017) and may contribute to higher food craving. Future research is needed to disentangle the relation between food craving, self-regulation and physical activity as they relate to brain and cardiac function.

Authors

• Jia Wu, Yale Univeristy
  Presenting Author

• Tara Chaplin, George Mason University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Rebecca E Hommer, NIH
  Non-Presenting Author

• Linda C Mayes, Yale Child Study Center
  Non-Presenting Author

• Michael J Crowley, Yale Child Study Center, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author