Effect of obesity on arithmetic processing in preteens with high and low math skill

Authors: ALATORRE-CRUZ, GRACIELA - Arkansas Children'S Nutrition Research Center (ACNC); DOWNS, HEATHER - Arkansas Children'S Nutrition Research Center (ACNC); HAGOOD, DARCY - Arkansas Children'S Nutrition Research Center (ACNC); SORENSON, SETH - University Arkansas For Medical Sciences (UAMS); WILLIAMS, DAVID - University Arkansas For Medical Sciences (UAMS); LARSON-PRIOR, LINDA - University Arkansas For Medical Sciences (UAMS)

Submitted to: Meeting Abstract
Publication Type: Abstract Only
Publication Acceptance Date: 3/15/2021
Publication Date: N/A
Citation: N/A

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: Childhood obesity has reached epidemic proportions, with an estimated prevalence of ~18% of children and adolescents. In addition to well-known physiological comorbidities, childhood obesity is associated with deficits in cognitive function. Relative to their normal weight peers, obese children tend to exhibit lower academic achievements (Martin et al., 2017). Though multifactorial, obesity-related deficits in academic performance have been linked to impairments in executive function - including working memory, reasoning and cognitive flexibility (Liang et al., 2014) - that have in turn been associated with low mathematical achievement (Cragg et al., 2017).While neuroimaging studies have examined changes in mathematical fact processing between children and adults, we know of no electrophysiological studies assessing arithmetic processing in obese preteens. For that reason, we examined the relative performance of obese pre-teens (OB) and their normal weight peers (NW) on a verification task of addition and subtraction operations using event-related potentials (ERP).