Frank GKW, Shott ME, Stoddard J, et al. - Researchers aimed at determining the correlation between brain reward response and specific behaviors across the eating disorder diagnostic spectrum.

• In this cross-sectional functional brain imaging study, brain response was examined during unexpected receipt or omission of a salient sweet stimulus across a large sample of individuals.

• Participants comprised 197 women with anorexia nervosa, other specified feeding and eating disorders, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating disorder and 120 healthy individuals as controls.

• During a sucrose taste classic conditioning paradigm, the dopamine-related prediction error was evoked by the violations of learned relationships between conditioned visual and unconditioned taste stimuli.

• Hierarchical brain activation between food intake relevant brain regions was examined via studying dynamic effective connectivity during expected sweet taste receipt.

• There appeared a significant inverse correlation of brain salience response with BMI and binge eating severity and its positive correlation with ventral striatal-hypothalamic circuitry.

• Overall, eating disorder behaviors influence brain reward processing, which may affect food intake control circuitry and reinforce the individual’s eating disorder behavior.