Science of Eating Disorders
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Serotonin Function in Bulimia Nervosa – Brain Circuits & Behaviour
Serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine, 5-HT) is a neurotransmitter that is involved in just about everything. It helps ensure proper cell growth, maturation and migration during development. Serotonin is also important in regulating emotions, cognitive functions, appetite, pain, circadian rhythms, and our endocrine system in adulthood. It is hardly a surprise then, that the serotonergic system seems to be important in bulimia nervosa (BN).
I’ve written previously about serotonin in restricting-type anorexia nervosa, so for this post I’m going to be shifting focus and talk about bulimia and binge-purge type anorexia nervosa (AN-BP).
The information in this post isn’t coming from a review paper. Instead, I’m going to be summarizing and explaining information from a chapter in a book titled Behavioural Neurobiology of Eating Disorders. In the chapter on serotonin and bulimia, Howard Steiger and colleagues propose a model for serotonin action in bulimia nervosa which takes into account “diverse hereditary and environmental influences… and helps account for heterogeneous traits seen in the bulimic population“.
Individuals whose eating disorders are characterized by the presence of binge-eating and purging display a …
Benefits of Starving and Why You Don’t Have a “Chemical Imbalance”
Most people hate starving, hate prolonged hunger and suck at dieting. Anorexics, on the other hand, excel in these areas. How can someone like being hungry? How are they able to exert such “self-control” (as many non-ED people often say) over their food intake? Part of the answer might lie with serotonin. But don’t worry, there’s no “chemical imbalance” – it is much more complex than that.
In this post, I’m going to continue discussing the review article in Nature Neuroscience (2009) by Kaye et al., focusing on what is currently known or hypothesized about the role of serotonin in anorexia (reminder, findings Kaye et al focuses are specific to restricting-type AN and may not apply to AN-BP or BN).
BUT FIRST, A LITTLE NEUROSCIENCE
Serotonin (aka 5-hydroxytryptamine or 5-HT) is a neurotransmitter, meaning that it is a chemical messenger that cells in the brain use to communicate with one another. Neurons that make and release serotonin are located in a region called the raphe nucleus. These neurons project and “connect” to a variety of regions in the …
Science of Eating Disorders by Tetyana Pekar is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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