Characterizing the Relationships of Genetic Risk and Parental Coercive Feeding Practices With Appetitive Traits and Adiposity Gain Across Early Life.

Status: Recruiting
Location: See location...
Intervention Type: Behavioral
Study Type: Interventional
Study Phase: Not Applicable
SUMMARY

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.

Eligibility
Participation Requirements
Sex: All
Minimum Age: 2
Maximum Age: 6
Healthy Volunteers: t
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• parent must be ≥18 years old, have primary custody of their child for ≥75% of the month, comprehend verbal and written English and not plan to move out of Vermont or New Hampshire during the study timeframe.

• Children must be ≥2.25 and ≤2.99 years old at first visit and have normal or corrected-to-normal vision to enable eye tracking.

Locations
United States
New Hampshire
Dartmotuh College
RECRUITING
Hanover
Contact Information
Primary
Jennifer Emond, PhD
jennifer.emond@dartmouth.edu
1-603-646-5709
Time Frame
Start Date: 2024-07-18
Estimated Completion Date: 2029-08
Participants
Target number of participants: 330
Treatments
Active_comparator: Food Cues
Attentional bias to Food cues experimental measurement
Active_comparator: Control Cues
Attentional bias to food cues control measurement
Related Therapeutic Areas
Sponsors
Collaborators: Dartmouth College, National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center
Leads: Trustees of Dartmouth College

This content was sourced from clinicaltrials.gov