TOPLINE:

A genetic risk score (GRS) predicted the risk emotional hunger (EH) in people with obesity and may enable testing of potential therapies. EH is defined as a high score (≥ 7) on the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS).

METHODOLOGY:

• Researchers calculated EH-GRS values among 483 study participants, using variants of genes associated with anxiety-and-depression-related neurotransmitter pathways — HTR2A, TPH2, DRD2, and ANKK1 — as well as patient height.
• Predictions were validated on additional GRS data from independent testing (n = 57) and validation (n = 48) datasets used in prior work.
• Individual questions from the Three-Factor Eating Questionnaire (TFEQ) were tested to determine which ones most improved model accuracy.

TAKEAWAY:

• An area under the curve (AUC) of 0.69 was observed in the training set, followed by 0.72 on the test dataset, and 0.85 on the validation set.
• In a subset of 137 participants with available TFEQ data, two questions related to loneliness significantly enhanced model performance, increasing the AUC by 0.04.
• With the EH-GRS, relationships between EH and therapies could potentially be tested in biobanks, retrospective studies, and other cases where patient responses to HADS cannot be obtained.
• For patients who do not have obesity (defined as BMI > 30), EH-GRS could assess future vulnerability and risk for obesity.

IN PRACTICE:

“Emotional hunger is a real contributor to weight gain, and it’s often overlooked or misunderstood in today’s obesity care,” Andres Acosta, MD, PhD, cofounder of Phenomix Sciences and obesity expert at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, said in a communication. “These early findings reinforce where the field is headed: precision obesity care that recognizes the biological, behavioral, and emotional components of the disease.” 

SOURCE:

Timothy O’Connor, PhD, chief technology officer at Phenomix, which developed the EH-GRS, presented the findings at the 2026 Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing, Hawaii.

LIMITATIONS:

This is a small, “early days” feasibility study.

DISCLOSURES:

O’Connor declared being an officer at Phenomix, which developed the EH-GRS.

Marilynn Larkin, MA, is an award-winning medical writer and editor whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including Medscape Medical News and its sister publication MDedge, The Lancet (where she was a contributing editor), and Reuters Health.