ArticlePloS one2016
Evidence that Illness-Compatible Cues Are Rewarding in Women Recovered from Anorexia Nervosa: A Study of the Effects of Dopamine Depletion on Eye-Blink Startle Responses.
Article in PloS one, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 27 citations in OpenAlex.
- Efficacy of transcranial magnetic stimulation in anorexia nervosa: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Eating and weight disorders : EWD · 2025Pooled it
- Moving towards specificity: A systematic review of cue features associated with reward and punishment in anorexia nervosa.Clinical psychology review · 2020Pooled it
- Recovery From Anorexia Nervosa: A Concept Analysis.Journal of advanced nursing · 2026Review
- Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making in Anorexia Nervosa.Current psychiatry reports · 2025Review
- Investigating Associations Between General and Disorder-Specific Reward and Suicidality in Anorexia Nervosa.European eating disorders review : the journal of the Eating Disorders Association · 2025Article
- Testing a Reward-Processing Model of Negative Urgency in Women With and Without Binge Eating.Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Article
- A transdiagnostic and translational framework for delineating the neuronal mechanisms of compulsive exercise in anorexia nervosa.The International journal of eating disorders · 2024Review
- Successful extracorporeal membrane oxygenation treatment of catecholamine-induced cardiomyopathy-associated pheochromocytoma: a case report.Acute and critical care · 2024Article
- Mesolimbic Neurobehavioral Mechanisms of Reward Motivation in Anorexia Nervosa: A Multimodal Imaging Study.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Article
- Psychopathological and Neurobiological Overlap Between Anorexia Nervosa and Self-Injurious Behavior: A Narrative Review and Conceptual Hypotheses.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Article
- Aberrant neural representation of food stimuli in women with acute anorexia nervosa predicts treatment outcome and is improved in weight restored individuals.Translational psychiatry · 2021Article
- Adapting a neuroscience-informed intervention to alter reward mechanisms of anorexia nervosa: a novel direction for future research.Journal of eating disorders · 2021Review
- Dopaminergic activity and exercise behavior in anorexia nervosa.OBM neurobiology · 2020Article
- The posited effect of positive affect in anorexia nervosa: Advocating for a forgotten piece of a puzzling disease.The International journal of eating disorders · 2019Article
- An Overview of Conceptualizations of Eating Disorder Recovery, Recent Findings, and Future Directions.Current psychiatry reports · 2018Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In anorexia nervosa (AN), motivational salience is attributed to illness-compatible cues (e.g., underweight and active female bodies) and this is hypothesised to involve dopaminergic reward circuitry. We investigated the effects of reducing dopamine (DA) transmission on the motivational processing of AN-compatible cues in women recovered from AN (AN REC, n = 17) and healthy controls (HC, n = 15). This involved the acute phenylalanine and tyrosine depletion (APTD) procedure and a startle eye-blink modulation (SEM) task. In a balanced amino acid state, AN REC showed an increased appetitive response (decreased startle potentiation) to illness-compatible cues (underweight and active female body pictures (relative to neutral and non-active cues, respectively)). The HC had an aversive response (increased startle potentiation) to the same illness-compatible stimuli (relative to neutral cues). Importantly, these effects, which may be taken to resemble symptoms observed in the acute stage of illness and healthy behaviour respectively, were not present when DA was depleted. Thus, AN REC implicitly appraised underweight and exercise cues as more rewarding than did HC and the process may, in part, be DA-dependent. It is proposed that the positive motivational salience attributed to cues of emaciation and physical activity is, in part, mediated by dopaminergic reward processes and this contributes to illness pathology. These observations are consistent with the proposal that, in AN, aberrant reward-based learning contributes to the development of habituation of AN-compatible behaviours.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.