Science of Eating Disorders
inpatient
Anorexia Nervosa: Can We Blame The Season Of Birth?
I bet you are thinking parents. Or media. Or thin models. Nope.
The SoB I am talking about is the season of birth bias (when the SoB pattern in a specific group differs from that of the general population.)
That SoB.
You might have heard that individuals born between the months of June – August (or sometimes March – August) have a higher chance of developing anorexia nervosa. But is it true? A lot of studies have been done to investigate the question of whether a season of birth (or a month) correlates with a higher risk of anorexia or bulimia nervosa. The results are inconsistent, weak, and fraught with methodological problems.
But first, how could seasons (or the average temperature during birth, or conception) have an effect on the etiology of eating disorders? What’s the hypothesis?
I’m going to summarize some of the studies published on this topic, just to give you an idea of where the field is with regard to this question, and then I’ll briefly touch on some of the methodological problems in many …
Eating Disorders and Psychiatric Comorbidities in Female Inpatients
Patients with eating disorders commonly exhibit comorbid psychiatric disorders, including anxiety, depression and OCD. The presence of comorbid disorders has been shown to exacerbate the severity and chronicity of the disorder, and unfavourably affect treatment outcome. Moreover, comorbid disorders may necessitate specialized treatment plans that take into account all the co-occuring disorders. Recovery from an eating disorder is hard enough, but when it is complicated by depression and severe anxiety, it can be a lot harder.
Nonetheless, commonly co-occuring psychiatric disorders may also provide researchers and clinicians clues about the etiology of eating disorders, the underlying neuronal processes as well as possible pharmacological interventions.
Researchers have been identifying disorders that commonly co-occur with eating disorders and studying the differences in co-morbidity between disorders. I picked one to write about today, it is a study by Blinder and colleagues that came out in 2007. It is by no means the best, but also not the worst, and of course it has several limitations, which I will mention. But it is a place to start.
This is a retrospective study, meaning that the authors went back through …
- Transitioning from Adolescent to Adult Eating Disorder Treatment Programs: What Are The Challenges?
- Bingeing and Purging: Keeping the “Positives” and Eliminating The Negatives?
- Dancing Your Way to Recovery from Anorexia Nervosa
- International Conference on Eating Disorders (ICED) 2013: Personal Reflections
- Pills for Bites: The Alarming Link between Drug Abuse and Eating Disorders
- Factors Associated with Recovery from Anorexia Nervosa
- Patient Perspectives on Anorexia, Treatment, and Therapeutic Alliance
- Family-Based Treatment for Adolescents with Anorexia Nervosa: Hype or Hope?
- Nonpurging Bulimia Nervosa: Where Does It Fit?
- What’s The Point of Bingeing and Purging? And Why Can’t You Just Stop?
- Should Insurance Companies Cover Residential Treatment for Eating Disorders?
- Does Too Much Exposure to Thin Models Cause Eating Disorders? Anorexia, Bulimia in Blind Women
- Are All Anorexics Just Afraid Of Being Fat and Can We Blame The Western Media?
- What’s Wrong with How We Talk About Eating Disorders in the Media and in ED Communities – Part 2
- When Clinicians Do More Harm Than Good (Attitudes Toward Patients with Eating Disorders)
- Family-Based Treatment for Adolescents with Anorexia Nervosa: Hype or Hope?
- International Conference on Eating Disorders (ICED) 2013: Personal Reflections
- The “Double Life” of Bulimia Nervosa: Patients’ Perspectives
- How Can We Treat Chronic and Severe Anorexia Nervosa? (On the Need for New Approaches)
- What’s Wrong with How We Talk About Eating Disorders in the Media and in ED Communities – Part 1
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Liz Agreed! It sounds like they are missing out on a L
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Andrea Hi Liz, Sorry if I was unclear in the post; in th
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Charlotte I can't articulate how much I can relate to e
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peridot
This article really resonates with me because I ha
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Pre-morbid BMI, weight restoration, and amenorrhoe
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ko I read your comment and can relate to everything y
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Liz
"Could it not be a more parsimonious explanat
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A:)
Also, this post made me wonder. . . what about jus
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Hmmmm. . . OK so let me see if I understand this (
Science of Eating Disorders by Tetyana Pekar is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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Can Eating Disorders Be Contagious?
Treating a patient with an eating disorder can often feel like walking on eggshells; it is easy to say or do the wrong thing. I’ve covered this topic in my previous posts. In my first post, I wrote about negative attitudes that health care providers often have with regard to eating disorder patients and in my second post, I covered some ways in which caring clinicians that do work with ED patients may – usually inadvertently - negatively impact treatment, often by impairing the physician-patient/caregiver relationship.
But let’s forget about clinicians for a second, what if the treatment environment itself is damaging? Could treatment itself do more harm than good?
That’s the question that Walter Vandereycken explored in this commentary article. (This interesting paper was brought to my attention by a reader – you know who you are, so thanks!)
And just to be really clear Vandereycken doesn’t mean contagious in the infectious-disease kind of way. Coming into contact with someone who has an eating disorder is not going to put you in danger of getting an eating disorder yourself.…