Recruiting

Observational Study

Sponsor:

Trustees of Dartmouth College

Code:

NCT06534541

Conditions

Childhood Obesity

Eligibility Criteria

Sex: All

Age: 2 - 6

Healthy Volunteers: Accepted

Interventions

Attentional bias to food cues

Study Details

Brief summary:

The preschool years (2-5 years of age) is a critical timeframe to shape the lifetime risk of obesity. While the causes of obesity are complex, appetitive traits related to overeating, such as high food approach and low food avoidance, are robustly associated with a greater BMI among children. Some children are genetically pre-disposed to expressing obesogenic appetitive traits, and those traits may mediate a genetic risk for obesity. Separately, parental feeding practices are emerging as an important, yet modifiable, influence on children's obesity risk. Coercive control feeding practices, such as strictly limiting a child's intake of highly palatable foods (restriction) and using food to control children's negative emotions (emotional feeding), are believed to be detrimental for young children because they impede self-regulatory skills around eating and may increase the saliency of highly palatable foods. The goal for this project is to disentangle the inter-relationships between coercive control feeding practices, children's obesogenic appetitive traits, and children's dietary intake across the preschool years to understand how coercive control feeding practices ultimately impact children's adiposity gain over time. Importantly, the investigators aim to understand how those effects differ based on children's underlying genetic risk for obesity. The investigators hypothesize that parents will respond to children's obesogenic appetitive traits by exhibiting more coercive control feeding practices (restriction, emotional feeding), which in turn, will promote future increase in obesogenic appetitive traits and overconsumption, leading to excess adiposity gain among children. Importantly, the investigators hypothesize children with a high genetic risk for obesity will be most susceptible to the negative effects of coercive control feeding practices because food is highly salient for them. The investigators will test the hypotheses among a cohort of children aged 2.5 years old using a longitudinal study design with repeated assessments every 6 months until children are 5 years old. If successful, study findings may be leveraged to develop tailored strategies to help parents support healthy eating behaviors among their young children that consider the heterogeneity in obesogenic appetitive traits among young children due to genetic risk factors.

Conditions

Childhood Obesity

Study ID

NCT06534541

Start date

Jul 18, 2024

Status verified date

Oct, 2026

Completion date

Aug, 2029

Anticipated

Primary completion date

Aug, 2028

Anticipated

Eligibility Criteria

Eligibility Criteria

Sex: All

Age: 2 - 6

Healthy Volunteers: Accepted

Inclusion Criteria:

  • parent must be ≥18 years old, have primary custody of their child for ≥75% of the month, comprehend verbal and written English and not plan to move out of Vermont or New Hampshire during the study timeframe.
  • Children must be ≥2.25 and ≤2.99 years old at first visit and have normal or corrected-to-normal vision to enable eye tracking.

Exclusion Criteria:

  • Children with any relevant food allergies or dietary restrictions, taking medication or with a medical condition that affects appetite or attention, or with a relative enrolled in the study will be excluded.

Study Design

Enrollment

330 participants

Anticipated

Allocation

Randomized

Intervention Model

Crossover

Primary purpose

Basic Science

Interventions and Outcome Measures

Arms

active comparator: Food Cues

Attentional bias to Food cues experimental measurement

active comparator: Control Cues

Attentional bias to food cues control measurement

Interventions

Attentional bias to food cues

Measurement of the amount of attention given to food cues

Primary outcome measure

  • Coercive Parental Food Practices [ Time Frame: Measured every 6 months from baseline until 2.5 years after baseline. ]
  • Appetitive Traits [ Time Frame: Measured every 6 months from baseline until 2.5 years after baseline. ]
  • Eating in the Absence of Hunger. [ Time Frame: Measured every 6 months from baseline until 2.5 years after baseline. ]
  • Adiposity [ Time Frame: Measured every 6 months from baseline until 2.5 years after baseline. ]

Central Contacts and Locations

Central contacts

Jennifer Emond, PhD

1-603-646-5709jennifer.emond@dartmouth.edu

Locations

Dartmotuh College

Recruiting

Hanover, New Hampshire, United States, 03765

Contacts

John Brand, PhD

john.brand@dartmouth.edu

More Information

Sponsor

Trustees of Dartmouth College

Last update posted

Oct 15, 2026

Last verified

Oct, 2026

Trial information was received from ClinicalTrials.gov and was last updated on 2026-10-23. This information was provided to ClinicalTrials.gov by Trustees of Dartmouth College on 2026-10-15. Recruitment status is synced daily from ClinicalTrials.gov and may not reflect the sponsor's current status. Confirm during your call.