Training App for Inhibitory Control Towards Food

Summary

The aim of this project is to test the feasibility, acceptability and clinical impact of a mobile app-based intervention (FoodTraining) to strengthen food-related inhibitory control over 4 weeks, in a sample of people with eating or weight disorders (i.e. obesity, binge-eating disorder (BED), or bulimia nervosa (BN)) receiving standard outpatient treatment (i.e., treatment as usual (TAU) encompassing guided self-help or psychotherapy, pharmacological therapy or diet). The training will be offered in addition to TAU (experimental group) and compared to TAU alone (control group).

Participants will complete questionnaires to measure eating behaviour, eating disorder psychopathology, symptoms of anxiety, depression and stress, social functioning and quality of life at baseline, 4 and 8 weeks. They will also complete momentary assessments using a mobile application (FoodTracker) to report on food intake along with related thoughts, emotions, and behaviours and will wear small, non-invasive sensors to track real-time fluctuations in glucose levels for 15 days.

Participants will also perform a food-related go-no go task and a food-related temporal discounting task at baseline, 4 and 8 weeks.

Finally, this study will pilot the use of a semi-structured interview to characterise the history of weight, the appetite system, eating-related habits in the family and learning of eating behaviours and attitudes in people with eating or weight disorders.

Conditions

• Obesity &Amp; Overweight
• Bulimia Nervosa
• Binge-Eating Disorder

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Food-specific inhibitory control training delivered through the FoodTraining App

Participants will complete one training session per day for the first week and three sessions per week for the following three weeks (4 weeks in total). Each session lasts about 5 minutes and includes 3 blocks of stimuli presentation. In each block, 32 images (8 low-energy-dense foods, 8 high-energy-dense foods, 16 neutral objects) are presented for 1500ms with a 500ms interstimulus interval. One-hundred ms after the image presentation, a red or green circle appears. Participants will have to tap the image when a green circle appears ("go" trials) and inhibit a response when a red circle appears ("no-go" trials). Low-energy-dense foods are always paired with "go" trials, high-energy-dense foods with "no-go" trials, and neutral objects with either "go" or "no-go" trials. After each block, participants receive feedback on mean accuracy and reaction time. Participants can personalise the training by selecting up to three categories of high-energy-dense foods to include.

BEHAVIORAL

Waiting list

Participants allocated to the control condition will not have access to the FoodTraining App during the active phase of the study (8 weeks), but will be offered the opportunity to access the app at the end of the 8-week follow-up period. This ensures that all participants, regardless of group allocation, will have the chance to benefit from the intervention once data collection is complete.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• University of Exeter

  collaborator OTHER

• University of Padova

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Valentina Cardi, PhD · Department of General Psychology, University of Padova, Padova, Italy

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

16 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2025-10-01

Primary Completion

2026-03-31

Completion

2027-03-31

Countries

• Italy

Study Locations