Does neuroscience research change behaviour? A scoping review and case study in obesity neuroscience

The language employed by researchers to define and discuss diseases can itself be a determinant of health. Despite this, the framing of diseases in medical research literature is largely unexplored. This scoping review examines a prevalent medical issue with social determinants influenced by the framing of its pathogenesis: obesity. Specifically, we compare the currently dominant framing of obesity as an addiction to food with the emerging frame of obesity developing from neuroinflammation. We triangulate both corpus linguistic and bibliometric analysis of the top 200 most engaging neuroscience journal articles discussing obesity that were published open access in the past 10 years. The constructed Neurobesity Corpus is available for public use. The scoping review analysis confirmed that neuroinflammation is an emerging way for obesity to be framed in medical research. Importantly, the articles analysed that discussed neuroinflammation were less likely to use crisis terminology, such as referring to an obesity “epidemic”. We highlight a potential relationship between the adoption of addiction frames and the use of stigmatising language in medical research.