Sweet taste liking is associated with subjective response to amphetamine in women but not men

Abstract

Rationale and Objective Preference for sweet taste rewards has been linked to the propensity for drug use in both animals and humans. Here we tested the association between sweet taste liking and sensitivity to amphetamine reward in healthy adults. We hypothesized that sweet likers would report greater euphoria and stimulation following d-amphetamine (20mg) compared to sweet dislikers. Methods Men (n=36) and women (n=34) completed a sweet taste test in which they rated their liking of various concentrations of sucrose and filtered water (0.05, 0.10, 0.21, 0.42, and 0.83M). Participants who preferred the highest concentration were classified as ‘sweet likers’. All others were classified as ‘sweet dislikers’. They then completed four sessions in which they received d-amphetamine (20mg) and placebo in alternating order, providing self-report measures of euphoria and stimulation on the Addiction Research Center Inventory (ARCI) at regular intervals. We conducted linear mixed effects models to examine relationships between sweet liking and drug-induced euphoria and stimulation. Results Sweet likers reported significantly greater amphetamine-induced euphoria than did sweet dislikers among women. By contrast, sweet liking was not associated with amphetamine response in men. No associations with stimulation were observed. Conclusion The association between sweet preference and amphetamine response in women is consistent with animal studies linking sweet taste preference and drug reward, and also fits with observations that individuals who use drugs show a preference for sweet tastes. Whether the sex difference is related to circulating hormones, or other variables, remains to be determined.

Neural activation to monetary reward is associated with amphetamine reward sensitivity

“…As previously reported in this dataset [40,41] Association between neural activation during reward and subjective response to amphetamine More BOLD activation during Win > Loss anticipation was associated with greater drug-induced euphoria (peak change difference ARCI-MBG score) in a large contiguous cluster that included the bilateral putamen and caudate (right: MNI peak [16,6,6], k = 266 voxels, Z = 3.62, p < .05, corrected; left: MNI peak [−20, 12, 2], k = 203 voxels, Z = 3.45, p < .05, corrected) ( Fig. 3) 1,2 .…”

“…Our study did not assess family history of drug use, which might influence activation to reward (see ref. [41]). Although, we typically detect a low prevalence of family history of alcoholism in drug challenge studies in our laboratory, it would be of interest to examine family history of SUD in relation to drug-induced euphoria and neural reward activation.…”

Effects of Sweet-Liking on Body Composition Depend on Age and Lifestyle: A Challenge to the Simple Sweet-Liking—Obesity Hypothesis

“…That is, individuals of normal weight experienced stronger pleasure from high sweetness relative to those overweight or with obesity. In contrast, the more recent literature has failed to show any significant relationships [29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37]. Accordingly, we might speculate that recruiting participants of a broad range of ages (i.e., 18-65 years) without accounting for the effect of the exposure to the obesogenic environment may have attenuated links between hedonic responses to sweetness and anthropometric outcomes.…”

“…Critically for the present context, data from studies on affective responses to sweetness have had inconsistent findings with regard to obesity. Some studies report no significant relationship [29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37] while others suggest individuals with overweight or obesity experience less pleasure from high sweetness compared to normal-weight individuals [38][39][40][41][42][43]. To better understand reasons for these conflicting reports, a critical consideration is the classification methods used to identify distinct sweet-liking patterns (i.e., sweet-liking phenotypes).…”

“…Notably, studies using BMI diverse samples identify participants with obesity more often as SDs compared to those with normal-weight [38][39][40][41]43]. Conversely, datasets with truncated BMI ranges (mean BMI between 20.1 kg/m 2 and 27.2 kg/m 2 ) have either failed to find an effect of the sweet-liking phenotype on BMI [30][31][32]35,[49][50][51] or differences in BMI between phenotypes which failed to reach statistical significance [29,33,36,37]. To date, only one study in adults has investigated body composition as a function of sweet-liking, and they found no evidence of differences in body fat across liker phenotypes [31].…”