The Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex And Obesity 

Anatomy

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is an area of the brain which is located in the frontal lobe at the bottom of both cerebral hemispheres. The function of the vmPFC is to adequately regulate emotional responses and to make aid in making morally acceptable decisions.

Injury or damage

Injury or damage to the vmPFC may result in certain issues and they include the following:

Emotional regulation 

• Damage to the vmPFC in early childhood may result in patients with severe antisocial behaviour as well as making impaired moral judgements.
• Emotions which can't be controlled may result in the patient committing crimes due to the inhibition factor that's missing.
• Emotional responsiveness in decreased and they show less emotions.
• In certain situations, patients may exhibit poorly regulated frustration and anger.
• Personality changes such as lack of empathy, poor decision making and irresponsibility can occur.

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Gender specific social cues

• There's an inability for these patients to process gender-specific social cues and thus showed impaired stereotypical social knowledge.

Decision making

• Lesions in the vmPFC may lead to impaired social and personal decision making abilities. Here, there's difficulty in deciding between options which have uncertain outcomes, regardless of what the uncertainty is.
• These patients also find it difficult to learn from their mistakes, and they may end up repeating the same wrong decision over and over again. 
• The involved individual may choose to make decisions which result in an immediate reward, despite the consequences of their actions.
• Damage to the vmPFC, in the right hemisphere of the cerebrum, may result in an inability to detect sarcasm, deception and irony.
• Injury to the left vmPFC can affect primitive defense mechanisms such as verbal denial, fantasy, splitting and projection. Injury to the right vmPFC can affect mature defense mechanisms such as compensation, intellectualization, isolation and reaction formation.
• Moral judgements seem to be made only in hypothetical situations, and therefore their decisions made in a real-world setup seem to be inconsistent with their moral beliefs. There seems to be a misinterpretation in reasoning when applying the same moral principles to situations in their lives.

Cocaine use

• The use of cocaine has been associated with decreased function of the vmPFC. When users were asked to perform tasks which required activation of the vmPFC, they would perform poorly.

• Chronic use of cocaine has been shown to result in a decrease of the grey matter in the vmPFC. The pyramidal cells in this area of the brain are also linked to drug/reward seeking behaviour.

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Disruption in addiction

Dysfunction of the vmPFC has been shown to be associated with addiction. In certain situations, activation of the injured vmPFC may result in a patient to exhibit or relapse into addictive behaviours.