Parental Feeding Practices for Childhood Obesity
Trial Summary
Will I have to stop taking my current medications?
The trial does not specify if you need to stop taking your current medications, but children taking medication that affects appetite or attention are excluded from participating.
What data supports the effectiveness of the treatment Attentional bias to food cues for childhood obesity?
Research suggests that children with obesity have a stronger attention bias towards food, similar to adults with obesity. This indicates that addressing attentional biases could be a useful part of obesity treatment, although a pilot study found that training to reduce this bias was not effective in maintaining weight loss in obese children.12345
Is the treatment of attentional bias to food cues safe for humans?
How does the treatment for parental feeding practices for childhood obesity differ from other treatments?
This treatment focuses on modifying parental feeding practices to address childhood obesity, which is unique compared to other treatments that may focus on diet, exercise, or medication. It targets the underlying behavioral aspects of feeding, aiming to change how parents influence their children's eating habits, rather than directly altering the child's diet or physical activity.2571011
What is the purpose of this trial?
The preschool years (2-5 years of age) is a critical timeframe to shape the lifetime risk of obesity. While the causes of obesity are complex, appetitive traits related to overeating, such as high food approach and low food avoidance, are robustly associated with a greater BMI among children. Some children are genetically pre-disposed to expressing obesogenic appetitive traits, and those traits may mediate a genetic risk for obesity. Separately, parental feeding practices are emerging as an important, yet modifiable, influence on children's obesity risk. Coercive control feeding practices, such as strictly limiting a child's intake of highly palatable foods (restriction) and using food to control children's negative emotions (emotional feeding), are believed to be detrimental for young children because they impede self-regulatory skills around eating and may increase the saliency of highly palatable foods. The goal for this project is to disentangle the inter-relationships between coercive control feeding practices, children's obesogenic appetitive traits, and children's dietary intake across the preschool years to understand how coercive control feeding practices ultimately impact children's adiposity gain over time. Importantly, the investigators aim to understand how those effects differ based on children's underlying genetic risk for obesity. The investigators hypothesize that parents will respond to children's obesogenic appetitive traits by exhibiting more coercive control feeding practices (restriction, emotional feeding), which in turn, will promote future increase in obesogenic appetitive traits and overconsumption, leading to excess adiposity gain among children. Importantly, the investigators hypothesize children with a high genetic risk for obesity will be most susceptible to the negative effects of coercive control feeding practices because food is highly salient for them. The investigators will test the hypotheses among a cohort of children aged 2.5 years old using a longitudinal study design with repeated assessments every 6 months until children are 5 years old. If successful, study findings may be leveraged to develop tailored strategies to help parents support healthy eating behaviors among their young children that consider the heterogeneity in obesogenic appetitive traits among young children due to genetic risk factors.
Research Team
Jennifer Emond, PhD
Principal Investigator
Dartmouth College
Diane Gilbert-Diamond, ScD
Principal Investigator
Dartmouth College
Eligibility Criteria
This trial is for children aged 2.5 to 5 years who may be at risk of obesity due to genetic factors and certain eating behaviors. It focuses on understanding how parents' feeding practices influence their child's weight gain over time, especially in those with a high genetic predisposition for obesity.Inclusion Criteria
Exclusion Criteria
Timeline
Screening
Participants are screened for eligibility to participate in the trial
Baseline Assessment
Initial assessment of children's genetic risk for obesity and baseline measurement of appetitive traits and adiposity
Longitudinal Assessment
Repeated assessments of coercive parental food practices, eating in the absence of hunger, appetitive traits, and adiposity every 6 months
Follow-up
Participants are monitored for changes in appetitive traits and adiposity after the main assessment period
Treatment Details
Interventions
- Attentional bias to food cues
Find a Clinic Near You
Who Is Running the Clinical Trial?
Trustees of Dartmouth College
Lead Sponsor
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center
Collaborator
National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK)
Collaborator
Dartmouth College
Collaborator