Description Module

Description Module

The Description Module contains narrative descriptions of the clinical trial, including a brief summary and detailed description. These descriptions provide important information about the study's purpose, methodology, and key details in language accessible to both researchers and the general public.

Description Module path is as follows:

Study -> Protocol Section -> Description Module

Description Module


Ignite Creation Date: 2025-12-25 @ 2:17 AM
Ignite Modification Date: 2025-12-25 @ 2:17 AM
NCT ID: NCT01665560
Brief Summary: The overarching goal of this project is to understand how nicotine addiction interacts with feeding behaviors and brain representation of food reward. The current proposal is part of a larger effort to begin a program of research to elucidate similarities and differences in perception of, and behavioral and neural response to, food and cigarette aromas as a function of 1) smoking status (smokers, ex-smokers who do gain weight, ex-smokers who do not gain weight, non-smokers), 2) internal state (hungry, full), and 3) cigarette deprivation (acute, chronic). A general hypothesis is that there are overlapping neural mechanisms governing food reward and cigarette reward in smokers and that this overlap includes incentive salience encoding.
Detailed Description: Weight gain frequently follows smoking cessation. Fear of weight gain is cited as a key reason not to quit and actual weight gain is a primary reason for relapse, especially among women. Although the causes of weight gain following smoking cessation are complex, increased caloric intake is recognized as one of the primary sources. One explanation for increased caloric intake is that, there are common neural mechanisms for food and cigarette reward and hence food reward can substitute for cigarette reward and vice versa. An alternative explanation for weight gain following smoking cessation is that there is an overall decrease in brain reward function during nicotine withdrawal, which leads to a decrease in the reward value of food and consequent increase in intake to maintain the total amount of reward obtained by food. The success of the proposed studies relies upon our ability to deliver odorants in the fMRI scanner and to measure neural activation in regions such as the amygdala, which are susceptible to inhomogeneity artifacts.
Study: NCT01665560
Study Brief:
Protocol Section: NCT01665560