The effects of Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation on food craving and food intake in individuals affected by obesity and overweight: a mini review of the magnitude of the effects

Obesity represents one of the wellness diseases concurring to increase the incidence of diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer. One of the main perpetuating factors of obesity is food craving, which is characterized by an urgent desire to eat a large and various amount of food, regardless of calories requirement or satiety signals, and it might be addressed to the alteration of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) activity. Despite most of the gold-standard therapies focus on symptom treatment only, non-invasive brain stimulation techniques such as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) could help treat overeating by modulating specific neural pathways. The current systematic review was conducted to identify whether convergent evidence supporting the usefulness of tDCS to deal with food craving are present in the literature. The review was conducted by searching articles published up to January 1st 2022 on MEDLINE, Scopus and PsycInfo databases. We included studies investigating the effects of tDCS on food craving in subjects affected by overweight and obesity. According to eligibility criteria, 5 articles were included. Results showed that tDCS targeting left DLPFC with unipolar montage induced ameliorating effects on food craving. Controversial results were shown for the other studies, that might be ascribable to the use of bipolar montage, and the choice of other target areas. Further investigations including expectancy effect control, larger sample sizes and follow-up are needed to support more robust conclusions. To conclude, tDCS combined with the use of psychoeducative intervention, diet and physical activity, might represents a potential to manage food craving in individuals with overweight and obesity.