Clinical Research Directory

Effectiveness of a 10-week Multicomponent Intervention Combined With Parent Education on Binge Eating Behavior in Children and Adolescents: a Randomized Controlled Trial With Long-term Follow-up

The main purpose is to investigate the effectiveness of a 10-week multicomponent camp intervention to reduce BE behavior in children and adolescents and explore in a randomized controlled setting if a parent-based BED-intervention has any add-on effect, attenuating the development of BE behavior in this sample. The study will include an initial follow-up assessment scheduled 10-12 weeks after camp completion and plans for long-term follow-up assessments one, three and five years after inclusion. Overall, we hypothesize that the multicomponent camp intervention will effectively reduce BE behavior in children and adolescents. Furthermore, we hypothesize that participants whose parents are randomized to receive the parental BED intervention will show a lower prevalence of BE behavior one year after the camp intervention compared with children whose parents receive standard care.

Precursors of Binge Eating Disorder in a Clinical Sample of Adolescents With Obesity

BACKGROUND: Binge eating disorder (BED) is the worldwide most-prevalent eating disorder. It is associated with psychiatric comorbidities and obesity, a high impact in life functioning, and high morbidity and mortality. First symptoms appear frequently in youths, who most commonly present incomplete (subthreshold) criteria for BED (precursor forms, PREC-BED). While some subjects will evolve from PREC-BED to BED, there is no gold standard to identify the clinical evolution. Information from prior studies suggest early alterations in reward and inhibitory brain circuits in PREC-BED may predict increased vulnerability or resilience to develop BED. Tools based on MRI brain connectivity analyses (MRI-BC), built on robust and interpretable connectivity whole-brain models, have proven successful in diagnostic classification and predicting certain clinical outcomes. OBJECTIVES: To study MRI-BC diagnostic markers of PREC-BED and to explore prognosis at 1 year of follow-up in a sample of adolescents with obesity (12-17 years old). METHODS: A) Transversal analytical design: 3-group (n=34 per group) comparison of neuroimaging (MRI-BC), neurocognitive and clinical markers in adolescents with obesity and i) BED, ii) PREC-BED, iii) no BED nor PREC-BED (Healthy group, HC). B) Longitudinal analytical design, pilot, exploratory: adolescents with PREC-BED will be evaluated in clinical and neurocognitive variables at 1 year. Baseline brain neuroimaging variables (alone and in combination with clinical and neurocognitive variables) will be analyzed as predictors of clinical prognosis, including conversion to BED.