Brain, Appetite, Teens, and Exercise

Summary

The long-term goal is to develop effective, evidence-based lifestyle interventions to prevent and treat childhood obesity and related co-morbidities. The short-term goal, and the purpose of this application, is to quantify appetite and neural mechanisms of food reward in overweight/obese (OW/OB) sedentary youth and to quantify changes following the implementation of a physical activity intervention. The central hypothesis is that appetite becomes dysregulated at low levels of physical activity via neural reward pathways, and appetite control will improve following a long-term exercise intervention. The investigators consider this project a pilot study designed to generate data to be used for future external funding opportunities, demonstrate collaboration between researchers, and test the feasibility of the protocols.

Conditions

• Energy Balance
• Appetitive Behavior
• Obesity

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Exercise Intervention

Youth randomized to the active condition will participate in an organized exercise program. During the exercise program, adolescents will participate in a supervised structured exercise (treadmill walking/cycling on stationary bike) on 3 days equivalent to approximately 180 min/week of moderate-intensity exercise. The rationale for this dose of structured exercise is based on national (ADA) and international physical activity recommendations for youth of 60 minutes/day.

BEHAVIORAL

Newsletter

Families will receive a monthly newsletter with "parenting tips, sample praise statements, and child-appropriate activities and recipes" identical to what has been used in the work of leaders in the field of pediatric obesity. Previous research suggests that newsletter/mail interventions are well received by participants and are frequently included in federally funded health intervention studies.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• University of Kansas Medical Center

  collaborator OTHER

• Children's Mercy Hospital Kansas City

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Robin Shook, PhD · Research Faculty PhD

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

HEALTH_SERVICES_RESEARCH

Masking

NONE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

14 Years

Max Age

17 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2018-09-01

Primary Completion

2019-08-10

Completion

2019-08-10

Countries

• United States

Study Locations