Allostatic load and executive functions in overweight adults

Abstract

Background/objective: Overweight is linked to inflammatory and neuroendocrine responses potentially prompting deregulations in biological systems harmful to the brain, particularly to the prefrontal cortex. This structure is crucial for executive performance, ultimately supervising behaviour. Thus, in the present work, we aimed to test the relationship between allostatic load increase, a surrogate of chronic physiological stress, and core executive functions, such as cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control, and working memory. Method: Forty-seven healthy-weight and 56 overweight volunteers aged from 21 to 40 underwent medical and neuropsychological examination. Results: Overweight subjects exhibited a greater allostatic load index than healthy-weight individuals. Moreover, the allostatic load index was negatively related to inhibitory control. When separated, the link between allostatic load index and cognitive flexibility was more marked in the overweight group. Conclusions: An overweight status was linked to chronic physiological stress. The inverse relationship between the allostatic load index and cognitive flexibility proved stronger in this group. Set-shifting alterations could sustain rigid-like behaviours and attitudes towards food.

Allostatic-Interoceptive Overload in Frontotemporal Dementia

“…Across cognitive domains, the moment-tomoment body internal states tracked with the HEP modulate the brain and cognitive responses to external stimuli (12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17). Source analyses of the HEP (12,18) and its neuroimaging correlates (19, J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f 20) are concordant with the allostatic-interoceptive brain regions as described above. Although the HEP has been traditionally used in heartbeat detection tasks, recent reports have shown HEP modulation in resting-state conditions (rsHEP) and during non-cardiac monitoring studies (12,21).…”

“…This association was not found in HCs or AD patients. These cognitive functions in healthy populations and conditions other than bvFTD seem to be supported and modulated by allostatic-interoceptive load (1, 16), and impaired by allostatic overload (9,(18)(19)(20)(21)(22). In sum, these results suggest that allostatic-interoceptive overload in bvFTD is associated with the patients' socio-cognitive impairments.…”

Allostatic Load and Its Impact on Health: A Systematic Review

“…Allostatic load was associated with healthdamaging lifestyle habits, such as lack of physical activity, unhealthy diet and poor sleep, in several investigations [52,228,229,233,239]. The metabolic syndrome, which may be fre quently associated with allostatic load [17], is an important example of the devastating effects of harmful lifestyles and of the need to prevent its occurrence as early as possible in life [314].…”

“…Physical activity was found to be associated with lower allostatic load [227][228][229], whereas poor sleep quality [230][231][232][233], unhealthy diet and overweight [52,218,228,[234][235][236][237][238][239], alcohol consumption [52,92,228,229,240] and smoking habits [241] were associated with high allo static load levels.…”

A predictive coding framework of allostatic–interoceptive overload in frontotemporal dementia

“…These impact their day-to-day functionality and behavior by increasing the misadjusted responses to environmental demands (Figure 2C) [95,96,98,99], such as under-reacting to evocative emotional stimuli [90,91,97] and presenting aberrant responses to social situations [100]. Convergently, many of these processes seem to be regulated by allostatic-interoceptive mechanisms [4,92], leading to allostatic overload [101][102][103][104][105][106]. For instance, bvFTD patients exhibit impaired performance in the heartbeat detection task (i.e., less accuracy in key-pressing following the sensing of a heartbeat) followed by negative facial emotion recognition (i.e., anger, disgust, sadness, and fear).…”