Orrù Graziella, Cesari Valentina, Malloggi Eleonora, Conversano Ciro, Menicucci Danilo, Rotondo Alessandro, Scarpazza Cristina, Marchi Laura, Gemignani Angelo
Department of Surgical, Medical and Molecular Pathology and Critical Care Medicine, University of Pisa, via Savi, 10, 56126, Pisa, Italy.
Department of Law, Criminal Law, University of Pisa, via Curtatone e Montanara, 15, 56126, Pisa, Italy.
AIMS Neurosci. 2022 Aug 1;9(3):358-372. doi: 10.3934/Neuroscience.2022020. eCollection 2022.
Obesity represents one of the wellness diseases concurring to increase the incidence of diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer. One of the main perpetuating factors of obesity is food craving, which is characterized by an urgent desire to eat a large and various amount of food, regardless of calories requirement or satiety signals, and it might be addressed to the alteration of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) activity. Despite most of the gold-standard therapies focus on symptom treatment only, non-invasive brain stimulation techniques such as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) could help treat overeating by modulating specific neural pathways. The current systematic review was conducted to identify whether convergent evidence supporting the usefulness of tDCS to deal with food craving are present in the literature. The review was conducted by searching articles published up to January 1 2022 on MEDLINE, Scopus and PsycInfo databases. We included studies investigating the effects of tDCS on food craving in subjects affected by overweight and obesity. According to eligibility criteria, 5 articles were included. Results showed that tDCS targeting left DLPFC with unipolar montage induced ameliorating effects on food craving. Controversial results were shown for the other studies, that might be ascribable to the use of bipolar montage, and the choice of other target areas. Further investigations including expectancy effect control, larger sample sizes and follow-up are needed to support more robust conclusions. To conclude, tDCS combined with the use of psychoeducative intervention, diet and physical activity, might represents a potential to manage food craving in individuals with overweight and obesity.
肥胖是导致糖尿病、心血管疾病和癌症发病率上升的健康问题之一。食物渴望是肥胖持续存在的主要因素之一，其特征是迫切想吃大量种类繁多的食物，而不顾卡路里需求或饱腹感信号，这可能与背外侧前额叶皮层（DLPFC）活动的改变有关。尽管大多数金标准疗法仅侧重于症状治疗，但非侵入性脑刺激技术，如经颅直流电刺激（tDCS），可以通过调节特定神经通路来帮助治疗暴饮暴食。本系统综述旨在确定文献中是否存在支持tDCS治疗食物渴望有效性的一致证据。该综述通过检索截至2022年1月1日在MEDLINE、Scopus和PsycInfo数据库上发表的文章进行。我们纳入了研究tDCS对超重和肥胖受试者食物渴望影响的研究。根据纳入标准，共纳入5篇文章。结果表明，采用单极电极配置靶向左侧DLPFC的tDCS对食物渴望有改善作用。其他研究结果存在争议，这可能归因于采用双极电极配置以及选择了其他目标区域。需要进一步开展包括控制期望效应、更大样本量和随访的研究，以支持更可靠的结论。总之，tDCS结合心理教育干预、饮食和体育活动，可能对管理超重和肥胖个体的食物渴望具有潜力。
