Dr. Gallagher and team have been testing whether ‘eye tracking’ can be used as an unbiased way to assess food interest/hyperphagia in PWS. Initial studies were promising, and here they will test the reproducibility of their initial studies, which were done in Ireland, and see if the results hold in US and Canadian PWS participants. Cultural adaptation of food choices will be incorporated into the tests to validate the approach.
Researchers are making exciting progress in developing new medicines to treat hyperphagia in PWS Prader-Willi Syndrome (PWS). A significant problem is that there is not a reliable way to measure hyperphagia or to know if medicines are effective in treating it. This is preventing many novel therapies from gaining approval from regulatory authorities and becoming available for use by people with PWS.
We have been working on an innovative solution to this measurement problem. We are using eye tracking technology to measure how much attention people with PWS pay to food. Eye tracking works by using a screen mounted camera to monitor eye-movement while looking at images on a screen and to detect what images grabs an individual’s attention. The advantage of our approach is that it is an objective way to measure attention to food and may have value as a marker of treatment response in clinical trials.
Our solution is called the "food attentional bias (FAB) task." In this test, we show pictures of food and other objects on a computer screen and monitor eye-movements. This helps researchers to understand how much attention people give to food. Interestingly, we found that even after someone with PWS has eaten a meal, they still pay a lot of attention to food unlike people without PWS. This might be contributing to the ongoing drive to eat.
It is very important for researchers to show that their research findings are reliable. This means that they need to show that their results are relevant in different settings by showing that research results can be reproduced in different settings and at different times.
To show our research is reliable we are addressing three key aims in this proposal:
1. We will adapt the FAB test to different cultures. We aim to use pictures and food choices in our research that make sense to people from different cultures. To do this, we will ask people from diverse cultures and caregivers of individuals with PWS about their thoughts on food images and meal preferences to help us to adapt the FAB task for different cultural contexts.
2. We will test the FAB task in a new context at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto so we can ensure our results are consistent in different settings.
3. Finally, we will assess if the FAB test results align with other tests that measure hyperphagia, and if they can repeat the test within a short time to see if it's reliable over time.
This research is very important because it could give us a way to monitor hyperphagia more objectively. Ultimately it could help in the progress of developing new therapies which would be an enormous advance in care for people with PWS.