Bariatric Surgery and Liraglutide's Impact on Cognitive Drivers of Weight Loss

Obesity is a complex, chronic disease influenced by both physiological and behavioral factors, often leading to significant health complications. Current effective treatments include bariatric surgery and pharmacological interventions like liraglutide, a GLP-1 receptor agonist. However, a critical gap remains in understanding how these treatments specifically modulate cognitive-behavioral processes, such as automatic approach tendencies and behavioral inhibition, that are crucial for long-term weight management.

As this is a recruiting study, specific results are not yet available, but the research aims to uncover significant insights into cognitive changes. The primary objective is to determine if both bariatric surgery and liraglutide can quantitatively improve behavioral inhibition and reduce automatic approach tendencies in patients with obesity. The study specifically aims to identify if these interventions lead to measurable changes in brain networks supporting motivational and inhibitory processes, potentially correlating with sustained weight loss. Researchers hypothesize that both treatments will demonstrate a positive modulation of these cognitive functions, with a goal to observe distinct or synergistic effects on long-term weight management outcomes among the 50 participants. The project seeks to quantify these cognitive shifts and their relationship to changes in satiety levels.