Leptin receptor co-expression gene network moderates the effect of early life adversity on eating behavior in children
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Leptin influences eating behavior. Exposure to early adversity is associated with eating behaviour disorders and metabolic syndrome, but the role of the leptin receptor on this relationship is poorly explored. We investigated whether individual differences in brain region specific leptin receptor (LepR) gene networks could moderate the effects of early adversity on eating behavior and metabolism. We created an expression-based polygenic risk score (ePRS) reflecting variations in the function of LepR gene network in prefrontal cortex and hypothalamus to investigate the interactions between a cumulative index of postnatal adversity on eating behavior in two independent birth cohorts (MAVAN and GUSTO). To explore whether variations in the prefrontal cortex or hypothalamic genetic scores could be associated with metabolic measurements, we also assessed the relationship between LepR-ePRS and fasting blood glucose and leptin levels in a third independent cohort (ALSPAC). We identified significant interaction effects between postnatal adversity and prefrontal-based LepR-ePRS on the Child Eating Behavior Questionnaire scores. In MAVAN, we observed a significant interaction effect on food enjoyment at 48 months (β = 61.58, p = 0.015) and 72 months (β = 97.78, p = 0.001); food responsiveness at 48 months (β = 83.79, p = 0.009) satiety at 48 months (β = -43.63, p = 0.047). Similar results were observed in the GUSTO cohort, with a significant interaction effect on food enjoyment (β = 30.48, p = 0.006) food fussiness score (β = -24.07, p = 0.02) and satiety score at 60 months (β = -17.00, p = 0.037). No effects were found when focusing on the hypothalamus-based LepR-ePRS on eating behavior in MAVAN and GUSTO cohorts, and there was no effect of hypothalamus and prefrontal cortex based ePRSs on metabolic measures in ALSPAC. Our study indicated that exposure to postnatal adversity interacts with prefrontal cortex LepR-ePRS to moderate eating behavior, suggesting a neurobiological mechanism associated with the development of eating behavior problems in response to early adversity. The knowledge of these mechanisms may guide the understanding of eating patterns associated with risk for obesity in response to fluctuations in stress exposure early in life.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".