Incidence of Eating Disorders on the … Decrease?

Reports that eating disorder (ED) rates are rapidly increasing seem nearly ubiquitous, but are rates actually increasing? Are EDs at an “epidemic” level? I came across a recently published study suggesting that this may not be the case; indeed, ED rates might actually be decreasing, at least in the Netherlands.

In the study, Smink and colleagues (2015) followed a group of general practitioners (GPs), servicing roughly 1% of the total population, asking them to record all the newly diagnosed patients with anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN) between 1985-1989, 1995-1999, and 2005-2009. They were interested in whether incidence rates changed or remained stable over time.

Incidence refers to the number of new cases of a disease or disorder in a population over a certain time period; it is not the same as prevalence, which refers to the total number of individuals suffering from the condition at a given point in time (or … Continue reading →