Anorexia Nervosa

Exploring Family Based Treatment for Eating Disorders in China

Jacqueline 6 Comments

Not much is known about eating disorders in China, especially compared to its East Asian counterparts of Hong Kong and Japan. It would appear that researcher-practitioners in China are not publishing much data about eating disorders in the country; in fact, the author of the study I’ll be looking at in this post, Joyce Ma, practices primarily in Hong Kong. In this study, Ma explores China-specific patterns of ED presentation and how they relate to the social context. As she notes, treatment models have been slow to develop from the mother-blaming paradigm proposed by Chen (1990), which recommended that eating disorder patients be isolated from their parents. No other study appears to have been done (at least that she cites) using evidence-based modalities.

In her study, she reports on the results of treatment with 10 families in a Shenzhen clinic, with patients of a relatively wide age range – … Continue reading →

We’re In This Together: Collaborative Care for Eating Disorders

Andrea 2 Comments

This week I had the pleasure of attending a workshop with Janet Treasure on collaborative care in eating disorders. Treasure focused her workshop on supporting caregivers of people with eating disorders, offering practical skills for carers and clinicians alike to improve interactions with those with eating disorders. Though I am neither a carer nor a clinicians, I got a lot out of the workshop, and it reminded me of a few of Treasure’s articles I’ve read over the years, and how much I appreciate her strong focus on working collaboratively with patients and families to facilitate recovery.

I especially appreciated how she aims to integrate those with lived experience (of either having an eating disorder or caring for someone with an eating disorder) in research and treatment design. Some of her journal articles, including this article on the potential for harm in existing treatment models, even include former patients as … Continue reading →

Poverty and Eating Disorders in Hong Kong

Jacqueline

Eating disorders are typically seen as an illness of the middle class, with most patients coming from that socioeconomic group. However, the invisibility of poorer patients within eating disorder research in part reflects the barriers to treatment that they face, including both cost and lower levels of awareness. This paper, written by a Hong Kong social work professor, Joyce Ma, focuses less on the process of eating disorder recovery, highlighting instead the context of treatment. She discusses how family dynamics and socioeconomic status come into play in her encounters with 7 Hong Kong teenagers from low-income families.

While her sample size is very small, it reveals a more diverse — and less body image-focused –disease pathway than most American studies, with Ma breaking down the precipitating factors as follows (patient numbers in brackets):

  • Constipation (1)
  • Desire to be thin (3, 7)
  • Relationship issues (6)
  • Parental conflicts (5)
  • Poverty (2, 4)
… Continue reading →

Culture and Eating Disorders: Treatment Outcomes in Singapore and Hong Kong

Jacqueline

In this last post about eating disorders in Singapore, I’ll write about the one Singapore-based retrospective outcome study in relation to a similar retrospective study conducted in Hong Kong.

In the Singapore study, researchers reviewed the charts of 94 patients diagnosed with anorexia nervosa from 1992 to 2004 at the National University Hospital, looking back from the time of the study. They didn’t contact any of the subjects for follow-up. 49 were first seen as inpatients, 34 as outpatients, and 11 were seen as outpatients but later admitted. The hospital doesn’t have a specialized ED service, so the authors relied on dietetic notes that unfortunately don’t provide a full picture of the patients’ eating disordered behaviors and cognitions.

The authors wrote about patient ‘improvement’ (not recovery!) as making a weight gain of at least 0.5 kg, or about 1 pound. 83% of their patients attended follow up appointments, which lasted … Continue reading →

Sensing the Body: Bodily Experience in Anorexia Nervosa

Andrea 1 Comment

I’ve been reading a lot of literature on bodies and eating disorders lately as I gear up to write the theoretical paper that becomes the basis of my PhD qualifying exam. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’ve become a little preoccupied with teasing out my understanding of the relationship between body image and eating disorders in an era in which even saying those words in the same sentence sparks visceral reactions among listeners.

This post is not about whether body image causes eating disorders or not (sorry to disappoint). It is, however, about one of the best articles I’ve stumbled across thus far that seeks to shed some light on the ways in which those with eating disorders (specifically anorexia nervosa, in this case) might experience bodily sensations, which in my view is much more interesting than quibbling about whether body image is the primary causal factor for eating disorders.

In the article, … Continue reading →

Culture and Eating Disorders: A Singaporean Perspective — Part 1

Jacqueline 2 Comments

Some previous posts on this blog have explored whether eating disorders might (or might not) be considered culture-bound, or in other words specific to or presenting specifically in certain cultures. If you consider eating disorders to be “culture bound,” they would present primarily in Western cultures, with non-Western cultures ‘receiving’ eating disorder pathology through Westernization. In this post, I explore eating disorders in the Singaporean context to continue to unpack the relationship between culture and eating disorders. Singapore is an interesting place in which to look at eating disorders (not just because I live there) because it complicates the idea of “culture-boundedness.”

Studies have been conducted in Asia; primarily in Hong Kong and to a lesser extent Japan. Most notably, Lee (1991) found non-fat-phobic presentations in Hong Kong supported by Ngai, Lee & Lee (2000) (see this post for more on the Ngai study). Singapore is … Continue reading →

Whose Culture is it Anyway? Disentangling Culture and Eating Disorders – Part 5

Andrea 24 Comments

We’ve begun to scratch the surface of the vast and growing literature on cultural context and eating disorders in the previous 4 posts in this series. Of course, as I reflected the other day, there could (maybe should?) be a blog solely devoted to this topic- each time I read another study in this area, it pulls me down the rabbit hole into another related area.

In what will be the last part of this series for now, I’ll review a study by Bennett, Sharpe, Freeman, and Carson (2004) on the request of Lisa LaBorde (via Twitter). The authors wanted to learn more about the presence (or lack thereof) of eating disorders in Sub-Saharan Africa, a context that they describe as less driven by the thin-ideal. This was, they suggest, the first thorough exploration of anorexia in sub-Saharan Africa, and so might reveal more about whether and how … Continue reading →

Whose Culture is it Anyway? Disentangling Culture and Eating Disorders – Part 2

Andrea 25 Comments

In this post I’ll continue on the trend of considering the “culture bound” nature of eating disorders by looking at another commonly-cited article about eating disorders and culture. In this article, Keel and Klump (2003) look at the cultural and historical facets of anorexia and bulimia. They looked at whether eating disorders were present in other sociohistorical and cultural contexts in order to determine whether AN and BN are “culture bound.”

Their research, as I alluded to at the end of the first post in this series, suggests that anorexia is not culture bound (i.e., it can occur in the absence of certain aspects of culture), while bulimia is (i.e., it only/primarily appears in certain cultural contexts). As this finding might actually run counter to what popular press would have us believe, looking at this article provides us some interesting insight into how spin can really be everything. … Continue reading →

Resistance is (not so) Futile? Exploring Treatment Resistance in Eating Disorders

Andrea 24 Comments

To me, the idea of “treatment resistance” in eating disorders sparks some ill feelings. While many have suggested that treatment resistance is common among those with eating disorders, others have noted how receiving the label of “treatment resistant” can make it more difficult to receive needed support or impact how one is perceived in treatment settings and how one’s behaviours are interpreted (e.g., Gremillion, 2003).

Of course, this is a tricky ground to tread, primarily because sometimes people do resist treatment. Regardless, I think it is important to think about what lies behind the resistance to treatment. Is it the type of treatment? The people doing the treating? The compelling nature of the behaviours (e.g., restricting, binging and purging) at least in the short term?

In any case, to say that treatment resistance occupies a contested place in the eating disorder literature would likely be an understatement. Perhaps for this … Continue reading →

Histamine and Anorexia Nervosa

Tetyana 8 Comments

Most of us have at some point in our lives taken antihistamines–drugs that block the action of histamine (e.g., Claritin, Allegra)–to relieve allergy symptoms. And while histamine is best known for its role in the immune response, it also has many other important roles in the central nervous system.

In the brain, histamine release is important for arousal (this is why antihistamines tend to make us drowsy). It has also been implicated in regulating appetite, taste perception, learning, memory, aggressive behavior, motivation, and emotion, among others (Yoshizawa et al., 2009; see this quick summary).

Alterations in histamine signalling in the brain have been implicated in a variety of disorders, including schizophrenia (Iwabuchi et al., 2005), depression (Kano et al., 2004), and multiple sclerosis (Wikipedia has a nice summary chart; or you can read this open paper for more details, too).

Of … Continue reading →