Citation

Voon V, Morris LS, Irvine MA, Ruck C, Worbe Y, Derbyshire K, Rankov V, Schreiber LR, Odlaug BL, Harrison NA, Wood J, Robbins TW, Bullmore ET, Grant JE. Neuropsychopharmacology 2014; 40(4): 804-812.

Affiliation

Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Neuroscience, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1038/npp.2014.242

PMID

25270821

Abstract

Pathological behaviours towards drugs and food rewards have underlying commonalities. Risk taking has a fourfold pattern varying as a function of probability and valence leading to the non-linearity of probability weighting with overweighting of small probabilities and underweighting of large probabilities. Here we assess these influences on risk taking in patients with pathological behaviours towards drug and food rewards and examine structural neural correlates of non-linearity of probability weighting in healthy volunteers. In the anticipation of rewards, subjects with binge eating disorder show greater risk taking, similar to substance use disorders. Methamphetamine dependent subjects had greater non-linearity of probability weighting along with impaired subjective discrimination of probability and reward magnitude. Ex-smokers also had lower risk taking to rewards compared to non-smokers. In the anticipation of losses, obesity without binge eating had a similar pattern to other substance use disorders. Obese subjects with binge eating also have impaired discrimination of subjective value similar to that of the methamphetamine dependent subjects. Non-linearity of probability weighting was associated with lower grey matter volume in dorsolateral and ventromedial prefrontal cortex and orbitofrontal cortex in healthy volunteers. Our findings support a distinct subtype of binge eating disorder in obesity with similarities with substance use disorders to risk taking in the reward domain. The results dovetail with the current approach of defining mechanistically based dimensional approaches rather than categorical approaches to psychiatric disorders. The relationship to risk probability and valence may underlie the propensity towards pathological behaviours towards different types of rewards.Neuropsychopharmacology accepted article preview online, 01 October 2014. doi:10.1038/npp.2014.242.

Language: en