ABSTRACT
Obesity is a major public health concern with wide-ranging societal impact. An estimated two-thirds of American adults (Ogden, Yanovski, Carroll, & Flegal, 2007) and one-third of American children and adolescents are overweight or obese (Ogden, Carroll, & Flegal, 2008). Recent annual U.S. economic costs attributed to obesity were estimated at $117 billion (Finkelstein, Fiebelkorn, & Wang, 2003). At the individual level, obesity throughout the lifespan is associated with increased morbidity and mortality (Adams et al., 2006; Ogden et al., 2007). More specifically, obesity is associated with increased cardiovascular risk (e.g., ischemic heart disease, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, and hyperlipidemia; de Lusignan et al., 2006; Joshi, Day, Lubowski, & Ambegaonkar, 2005; Ogden et al., 2007), as well as other medical (e.g., sleep apnea, osteoarthritis; Webber, 2001) and psychiatric (e.g., depression, anxiety; Cserjési, Luminet, Poncelet, & László, 2009) conditions. While systemic physiological consequences of elevated body mass and adiposity are relatively well established, the effects of obesity on the brain, in particular, are less well understood. However, there is growing evidence for significant alterations in cognition and brain structure related to obesity. Related discussion of diabetes mellitus, hypertension, and hyperlipidemia can be found in Chapters 4, 5, and 6 in this volume (Brands, van den Berg, Kessels, & Biessels, 2015; Elias, Goodell, & Robbins, 2015; Muldoon & Conklin, 2015).
