ArticleCerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)2023
Associations among body mass index, working memory performance, gray matter volume, and brain activation in healthy children.
Article in Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991), 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 16 citations in OpenAlex.
- Brain structural and functional changes in childhood and adolescent obesity: a systematic review of MRI studies.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Pooled it
- Effects of different long-term exercise interventions on working memory in children and adolescents: a network meta-analysis.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Pooled it
- Weight gain and brain development in the ABCD study cohort: A decade of insight and the road ahead.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Review
- Altered effective connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and caudate in children with overweight and obesity.International journal of obesity (2005) · 2026Article
- The association between medial prefrontal GABA concentration and memory performance is disrupted in human with a high body mass index.Brain imaging and behavior · 2026Article
- Structural and Functional Brain Changes in Children and Adolescents With Obesity.Obesity reviews : an official journal of the International Association for the Study of Obesity · 2025Review
- Associations of Prenatal Socioeconomic Status and Childhood Working Memory: A Structural Equation Modeling Approach.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Neural and Behavioral Correlates of Binge Eating in 9- to 10-Year-Old Children.Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry · 2025Observational
- The Impact of Different Types of Exercise on Executive Functions in Overweight/Obese Individuals: A Systematic Review and Network Meta-Analysis.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Molecular mechanisms underlying the neural correlates of working memory.BMC biology · 2024Article
- Associations of Brain Entropy Estimated by Resting State fMRI With Physiological Indices, Body Mass Index, and Cognition.Journal of magnetic resonance imaging : JMRI · 2024Article
- FTO variation and early frontostriatal brain development in children.Obesity (Silver Spring, Md.) · 2024Article
- Hippocampal Resting State Functional Connectivity Associated with Physical Activity in Periadolescent Children.Brain sciences · 2023Article
- Associations between body mass index, sleep-disordered breathing, brain structure, and behavior in healthy children.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
16 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
To investigate the neural mechanisms underlying the association between poorer working memory performance and higher body mass index (BMI) in children. We employed structural-(sMRI) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with a 2-back working memory task to examine brain abnormalities and their associations with BMI and working memory performance in 232 children with overweight/obesity (OW/OB) and 244 normal weight children (NW) from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development dataset. OW/OB had lower working memory accuracy, which was associated with higher BMI. They showed smaller gray matter (GM) volumes in the left superior frontal gyrus (SFG_L), dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, medial orbital frontal cortex, and medial superior frontal gyrus, which were associated with lower working memory accuracy. During the working memory task, OW/OB relative to NW showed weaker activation in the left superior temporal pole, amygdala, insula, and bilateral caudate. In addition, caudate activation mediated the relationship between higher BMI and lower working memory accuracy. Higher BMI is associated with smaller GM volumes and weaker brain activation in regions involved with working memory. Task-related caudate dysfunction may account for lower working memory accuracy in children with higher BMI.
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Registered trials
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.