The Sense of Small and Inhibition in Obesity

Istituto Auxologico Italiano25 enrolled

Overview

The aim of this research is to verify whether inhibitory control ability is different between a group of individuals with obesity and a group of individuals with normal weight in the presence of olfactory stimuli, different for valence, edibility (food versus no-food), and caloric density (high-calorie vs low-calorie content) of foods associated with odours.

Study Type

OBSERVATIONAL

Enrollment

Conditions

Obesity

Interventions

Experimental TaskBEHAVIORAL

The main task is an olfactory version of a traditional Go/No-Go task (Albayay et al., 2019): it includes the delivery of either an odour or clean air prior to the presentation of a visual target Moreover, all participants will be assessed with the italian version of the Stroop color and word test (Caffarra et al., 2004) to evaluate inhibition, together with selective and sustained attention. This neuropsychological test consists of three tables, showing color words (W), colored circles (C), and color words printed in incongruent ink (i.e., red printed in blue ink, CW), respectively. The Stroop effect consists of a delayed response when words have to be named according to the color of the ink, ignoring the meaning of the printed word.

Eligibility

Sex: ALLMin age: 20 YearsMax age: 55 YearsHealthy volunteers:

Medical Language ↔ Plain English

Inclusion criteria: * Right-handed * diagnosis of obesity (i.e., the level of body mass index (BMI) higher or equal to 30). Exclusion criteria: * Concurrent neurological, neurodevelopmental (e.g., autism), motor, somatosensory and/or psychiatric disorders.

Locations (1)

IRCCS Istituto Auxologico Italiano - Ospedale San Giuseppe

Piancavallo, VCO, Italy

Outcomes

Primary Outcomes

Error %

Percentage of the invalid answers, meaning when the participant erroneously press the key (i.e., answer) in the no-go (invalid) trials. This represents an index of inhibitory difficulty in the experimental task. This score will be computed according to Albayay and colleagues (2019).

Time frame: baseline

Secondary Outcomes

Interference Error

It will computed according to the following formula: score = CW - ((W + C)/2). The lower is the score, the best is the performance. Notably for each condition (W, C, and CW) the number of error can range from O (no error) to 36 (maximun number of error). This computation derives from the seminal article for the Italian version of the test (Caffarra et al., 2004).

Time frame: baseline

Data from ClinicalTrials.gov

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