Links for Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia

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Eating disorders, including anorexia and bulimia, affect a small but substantial number of women in their 40s and 50s, UK research suggests. The study, involving more than 5,000 women, found just over 3% reported having an eating disorder. Some said they had experienced it since their teens, others developed it for the first time in their middle age. Julie Spinks, from Beaconsfield, is 48. She was not involved in the study, but can relate first-hand to its findings. She developed anorexia for the first time when she was 44. "It was a complete shock at the time," she recalls. "I knew that I was restricting my food but I didn't ever think I had anorexia. "I'd been really unhappy at work and had very low self-esteem. To begin with I just thought I had lost my appetite. "I felt depressed, like I was not worth feeding or existing. I wanted to disappear and fade away." Julie started to lose weight quite quickly and began to exercise as well. She realised something was very wrong one day after she had been to the gym. Mind struggle "I'd run for about an hour and burnt off about 500 calories. I remember thinking that's about the same as a chocolate bar. That's when I started to link food and exercise." Julie still did not recognise she had anorexia though. "I thought anorexia was something that happened to other people. It didn't occur to me that I might have it." After a breakdown at work she went for a mental health assessment. Her doctors then diagnosed her with anorexia and depression. Julie was given antidepressants and began therapy sessions to help with her eating disorder. © 2017 BBC.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 23112 - Posted: 01.17.2017

By Laura Beil, Justin Shamoun began to hate his body a few weeks into seventh grade. He was a year younger than his suburban Detroit classmates, having skipped a grade. Many of his peers were entering puberty, their bodies solidifying into sleek young men. Justin still had the doughy build of a boy. After gym class one day, someone told Justin he could probably run faster if he weren’t so fat. The remark crushed him. Ashamed, he started hiding his body under ever-baggier clothes and making excuses to skip P.E., the pool, anywhere required to expose bare skin. Finally, he decided to fix himself. He dove headlong into sports and cut back on food. Before long, he was tossing his lunch into the garbage and picking at his dinner. He ate just enough to blunt his hunger, until the time came when he ate barely at all. The thought that he had an eating disorder never occurred to him. Long considered an affliction of women, eating disorders — the most deadly of all mental illnesses — are increasingly affecting men. The National Eating Disorders Association predicts that 10 million American men alive today will be affected, but that number is only an estimate based on the limited research available. The official criteria for diagnosing eating disorders were updated to be more inclusive of men only in 2013. And last year, Australian researchers writing in the Journal of Eating Disorders noted that “the prevalence of extreme weight control behaviors, such as extreme dietary restriction and purging” may be increasing at a faster rate in men than women. © 2016 Scientific American

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment; Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 23036 - Posted: 12.31.2016

By PHIL BARBER SAN FRANCISCO — Paraag Marathe’s structured, analytical mind has served him well in the offices of Silicon Valley and the National Football League. He figured that he could lean on those traits the first time he spoke publicly about his sister, Shilpa, and how anorexia had taken her life. But composure failed Marathe in 2011, six years after Shilpa’s death, while he spoke to survivors and grieving family members at an event for Andrea’s Voice, a nonprofit foundation that tries to promote education about eating disorders and their treatments. “Not only did I break down a little bit during that speech,” said Marathe, 39, the San Francisco 49ers’ chief strategy officer and executive vice president for football operations. “It was also one of those weird moments afterwards. I emotionally collapsed in the arms of somebody there who had lost her daughter.” The memories were back. Marathe had watched his brilliant sister succumb to self-destructive thoughts and starve herself. He had seen Shilpa wither to less than 50 pounds in the last years of her life, had felt the shame and puzzlement that her condition brought to his family. Fueled by regret — why had he not noticed sooner, and why wasn’t he more assertive in trying to help Shilpa? — Marathe has found his voice. He will patiently tell you that 30 million Americans are believed to suffer from eating disorders, and that medical insurance plans rarely cover treatment of the condition. He will remind you that anorexia has the highest fatality rate among mental illnesses — about 10 percent, according to a 2011 meta-analysis published in Archives of General Psychiatry and cited by the National Institute of Mental Health. Eating-disorder caregivers and advocates welcome Marathe’s help in shattering the myth that anorexia afflicts only well-to-do white girls and women. The illness claims men, too, and frequently remains a taboo subject in less affluent or nonwhite families, said Kristina Saffran of Project HEAL, an organization that raises money to cover care from diagnosis to recovery. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 22992 - Posted: 12.15.2016

By Deborah R. Glasofer, Joanna Steinglass Every day on the dot of noon, Jane* would eat her 150-calorie lunch: nonfat yogurt and a handful of berries. To eat earlier, she felt, would be “gluttonous.” To eat later would disrupt the dinner ritual. Jane's eating initially became more restrictive in adolescence, when she worried about the changes her body was undergoing in the natural course of puberty. When she first settled on her lunchtime foods and routine—using a child-size spoon to “make the yogurt last” and sipping water between each bite—she felt accomplished. Jane enjoyed her friends' compliments about her “incredible willpower.” In behavioral science terms, her actions were goal-directed, motivated by achieving a particular outcome. In relatively short order, she got the result she really wanted: weight loss. Years later Jane, now in her 30s and a newspaper reporter, continued to eat the same lunch in the same way. Huddled over her desk in the newsroom, she tried to avoid unwanted attention and feared anything that might interfere with the routine. She no longer felt proud of her behavior. Her friends stopped complimenting her “self-control” years ago, when her weight plummeted perilously low. So low that she has had to be hospitalized on more than one occasion. The longed-for weight loss did not make her feel better about herself or her appearance. Jane's curly hair, once shiny and thick, dulled and thinned; her skin and eyes lost their brightness. There were other costs as well—to her relationships, to her career. Instead of dreaming about a great romance, Jane would dream of the cupcakes she could not let herself have at her niece's birthday party. Instead of thinking about the best lead for her next story, she obsessed over calories and exercise. © 2016 Scientific American

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment; Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 22713 - Posted: 09.30.2016

By VANESSA FRIEDMAN IT’S been another big month for talking about women’s bodies. Just as the White House hosted the first United States of Women summit meeting, which culminated in Oprah Winfrey’s noting, in conversation with Michelle Obama, “We live in a world where you are constantly being bombarded by images,” across the ocean the new mayor of London was announcing a policy that would ban ads on public transport that might cause women to feel pressured “into unrealistic expectations surrounding their bodies.” Mayor Sadiq Khan’s policy sounds, on the surface, like a big step forward. Down with fat-shaming! But it is, rather, an old idea, and one that reinforces stereotypes instead of grappling with the real issue: How do we change the paradigm altogether? The immediate impetus for the ban, which will be carried out by the London transit authority via a steering committee that will rule on ads case by case, was a 2015 diet pill ad depicting a very tan, very curvy woman (the kind who is a staple of lad mags) in a bright yellow bikini alongside the words, “Are you beach body ready?” The implication was that if you had not achieved the unrealistic proportions of a Barbie, you were not. The public protested (a petition on change.org received more than 70,000 signatures), and Mr. Khan made it part of his election campaign. The regulation follows decisions by the Advertising Standards Authority of Britain to ban certain ads, such as a Gucci shot that depicted what was deemed an “unhealthily thin” young woman. Though often conflated with the movement to protect models, which resulted in legislation in France in 2015 requiring models to produce a doctor’s note attesting to their health, and digital alteration of photographs to be disclosed, banning is a separate issue. It doesn’t involve working conditions (which can and should be legislated), but subjective, and ultimately regressive, assumptions about what constitutes a positive female image. While I have no doubt that Mr. Khan had the best intentions (he made a reference to his desire to protect his daughters), and there is no question that studies have shown that depictions of thin women in idealized or overly airbrushed photographs can be an important factor in eating disorders and other types of body dysmorphia, I do not believe banning is the answer. And I say that as someone with two daughters (and a son) who is acutely aware of the distortions of the fashion world and their dangers. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 22363 - Posted: 06.27.2016

By Tulip Mazumdar Most people suffering with eating disorders in Japan are not receiving any medical or psychological support, according to doctors. The Japan Society for Eating Disorders claims the health system is failing hundreds of thousands of sufferers. It also says the pressure on girls, in particular, to be thin has "gone too far". The government says it's trying to set up more services and has tried to discover the extent of the problem. "I hated being chubby when I was a kid," says Motoko - who is using a different name to hide her identity. "The other kids bullied me so I always wanted to change." Motoko was 16 years old when her eating disorder started. She would severely limit how much she ate and then started exercising excessively. By the time she was 19, Motoko was dangerously underweight. She says her parents didn't know how to help her. "They were negative about my illness," she says. "When I tried to see my doctor, they told me not to. "My mother felt responsible, perhaps my father blamed her too." Fear of 'wasting food' Motoko's story is a familiar one. Stigma around eating disorders - for both sufferers and their families - prevent many people from coming forward. "They see actions such as binging on food and then vomiting (bulimia) as shameful," says clinical psychiatrist Dr Aya Nishizono-Maher, a member of The Japan Society for Eating Disorders. "They feel they have to hide it. Parents may think they are wasting food so that might stop them seeking help." After more than 10 years, Motoko finally started getting the help she needed and she now attends one of the few eating disorder community support groups which receives money from the government. © 2016 BBC.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 22137 - Posted: 04.25.2016

By DAN BILEFSKY LONDON — The model in the Gucci ad is young and waiflike, her frail body draped in a geometric-pattern dress as she leans back in front of a wall painted with a tree branch that appears to mimic the angle of her silhouette. On Wednesday, the Advertising Standards Authority of Britain ruled that the ad was “irresponsible” and that the model looked “unhealthily thin,” fanning a perennial debate in the fashion industry over when thin is too thin. The regulator said that the way the woman in the image had posed elongated her torso and accentuated her waist, so that it appeared to be very small. It said her “somber facial expression and dark makeup, particularly around her eyes, made her face look gaunt.” It said the offending image — a still photograph of the model that appeared in an online video posted on the website of The Times of London in December — should not appear again in its current form. The specific image was removed from the video on Gucci’s YouTube channel, though the model still appears in the ad directed by Glen Luchford. The image deemed "irresponsible" by the Advertising Standards Authority of Britain appeared at the end of this online video, but has been taken out. Video by Gucci The Italian fashion brand, for its part, had defended the ad, saying it was part of a video that portrayed a dance party and that was aimed at an older and sophisticated audience. Nowhere in the ads were any models’ bones visible, it said, and they were all “toned and slim.” It noted that “it was, to some extent, a subjective issue as to whether a model looked unhealthily thin,” according to the authority. The decision by the advertising authority, an independent industry regulatory group, barred Gucci from using the image in advertisements in Britain. The ruling comes amid a longstanding debate on both sides of the Atlantic about the perils of overly thin models projecting an unhealthy body image for women. As when critics lashed out against idealized images of “heroin chic” in the early 1990s, some have voiced concern that fashion houses are encouraging potentially hazardous behaviors by glamorizing models who are rail-thin. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 22080 - Posted: 04.07.2016

By ERICA GOODE Their websites show peaceful scenes — young women relaxing by the ocean or caring for horses in emerald pastures — and boast of their chefs and other amenities. One center sends out invitations to a reception with cocktails and hors d’oeuvres. Another offers doctors and therapists all-expense-paid trips to visit and experience their offerings, including yoga classes. Several employ staff who call mental health professionals, saying they would love to have lunch. The marketing efforts by these for-profit residential care centers are aimed at patients with eating disorders and the clinicians who treat them. The programs have proliferated in recent years, with some companies expanding across the country. The rapid growth of the industry — there are more than 75 centers, compared with 22 a decade ago, according to one count — has been propelled by the Affordable Care Act and other changes in health insurance laws that have increased coverage for mental disorders, as well as by investments from private equity firms. The residential programs, their directors say, fill a dire need, serving patients from areas where no adequate treatment is available. “Only 15 to 30 percent of people have access to specialized care for eating disorders, which means there are a lot of people out there who have zippo,” said Doug Bunnell, the chief clinical officer for Monte Nido, a program that began in Malibu, Calif., and now operates centers in five states. But the advertising and the profusion of centers, which typically cost $1,000 a day but can run much higher, is raising concerns among some eating disorders experts, who worry that some programs may be taking advantage of vulnerable patients and their families. In the companies’ rush to expand, they argue, quality of treatment may be sacrificed for profit. And they question whether the spalike atmosphere of some programs is so comfortable that it fosters dependency. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 21990 - Posted: 03.15.2016

By Roni Caryn Rabin The first time she skipped an insulin dose, the 22-year-old said, it wasn’t planned. She was visiting her grandparents over a summer break from college and indulged in bags of potato chips and fistfuls of candy, but forgot to take the extra insulin that people with Type 1 diabetes, like her, require to keep their blood sugar levels in a normal range. She was already underweight after months of extreme dieting, but when she stepped on the scale the next day, she saw she had dropped several pounds overnight. “I put two and two together,” said the young woman, who lives in Boston and wished to remain anonymous. She soon developed a dangerous habit that she used to drive her weight down: She would binge, often consuming an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s peanut butter cup ice cream, and then would deliberately skip the insulin supplements she needed. People with Type 1 diabetes, who don’t produce their own insulin, require continuous treatments with the hormone in order to get glucose from the bloodstream into the cells. When they skip or restrict their insulin, either by failing to take shots or manipulating an insulin pump, it causes sugars — and calories — to spill into the urine, causing rapid weight loss. But the consequences can be fatal. “I knew I was playing with fire, but I wasn’t thinking about my life, just my weight,” said the young woman, who was treated at The Renfrew Center of Boston, which specializes in treating eating disorders, and is in recovery. “I got used to my blood sugars running high all the time. I would get so nauseous I would throw up, which I knew was a serious sign that I should go to the hospital. It was very scary.” © 2016 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 21847 - Posted: 02.02.2016

By Carrie Arnold Most of the anorexia patients Dr. Joanna Steinglass sees in the inpatient eating-disorders unit at the New York State Psychiatric Institute have been to treatment before. While in the hospital or a residential treatment center, they generally gained weight and began to eat a wider variety of foods. But after they left, their old anorexic habits returned. They began skipping meals again or returning to their extreme exercise routines. All too soon, it seemed, the gains made in treatment and the hope for recovery that went along with it began to evaporate. According to the conventional wisdom around eating disorders, these relapses were really a misguided search for control. Or maybe the patients just weren’t ready for recovery yet. Or perhaps these were signs of self-control gone awry, spurred on by friends who marvel at their seemingly endless willpower. Interesting theories, and yet Steinglass disagreed. “Even when people show up at our hospital and want to make changes, they find it tough,” she said. Now a new study in Nature Neuroscience — which Steinglass co-authored — reveals why people with anorexia often struggle so much to integrate new ways of eating into their lives. In the brain, the behaviors associated with anorexia act a lot like habits, those daily decisions we make without thinking. And habits, according to both the scientific evidence and the colloquial wisdom, are phenomenally difficult to break. This new finding helps explain why anorexia has historically been so hard to treat: Anorexic patients are essentially fighting their own brains in an uphill battle for wellness. But more important, the new research may also point toward new and better ways to help those with the eating disorder overcome it. © 2015, New York Media LLC.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 21560 - Posted: 10.24.2015

By Sophia Kercher As Kathleen Emmets was undergoing cancer treatment in New York over the past few years, her weight began to drop. Even though she was often nauseated and paralyzed by chemotherapy-induced neuropathy, she joked that thinness was the “bonus of cancer,” and found herself looking in the mirror and admiring her deep and hollow collarbone. Ms. Emmets, now 39, filled her closet with extra-small size clothes. At night she pressed her fingers against her protruding bones, saying to herself, “I’m finally skinny.” But it was only when her cancer treatment changed that it became clear that the body-image issues she had been grappling with since her early 20s — when she would eat next to nothing and walk for six hours a day to deal with stress — had begun to resurface. When the new treatment didn’t make her sick, her appetite returned, and she began to gain weight. But instead of celebrating this sign of improving health, Ms. Emmets says she missed her size 2 jeans and was appalled by her round belly and full breasts. Her husband watched with concern as her body appeared stronger but she began imposing her own food restrictions and started shrinking again. “During your cancer treatment, you have no control over your body — you give up your body to your doctor,” said Ms. Emmets, who wrote about her experiences on the website The Manifest-Station. “You are willing to do it because you want to live. Food restriction is the one thing that you can do to have some sense of control when everything is chaotic.” While it isn’t known how often cancer triggers or reawakens an eating disorder, doctors and nutrition experts who work with cancer patients share anecdotal reports of patients who emerge from a difficult round of cancer treatment and weight loss only to begin struggling with a serious eating disorder that threatens their postcancer health. © 2015 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 21236 - Posted: 07.30.2015

By Rachel Feltman If you give a mouse an eating disorder, you might just figure out how to treat the disease in humans. In a new study published Thursday in Cell Press, researchers created mice who lacked a gene associated with disordered eating in humans. Without it, the mice showed behaviors not unlike those seen in humans with eating disorders: They tended to be obsessive compulsive and have trouble socializing, and they were less interested in eating high-fat food than the control mice. The findings could lead to novel drug treatments for some of the 24 million Americans estimated to suffer from eating disorders. In a 2013 study, the same researchers went looking for genes that might contribute to the risk of an eating disorder. Anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa aren't straightforwardly inherited -- there's definitely more to an eating disorder than your genes -- but it does seem like some families might have higher risks than others. Sure enough, the study of two large families, each with several members who had eating disorders, yielded mutations in two interacting genes. In one family, the estrogen-related receptor α (ESRRA) gene was mutated. The other family had a mutation on another gene that seemed to affect how well ESRRA could do its job. So in the latest study, they created mice that didn't have ESRRA in the parts of the brain associated with eating disorders. "You can't go testing this kind of gene expression in a human," lead author and University of Iowa neuorscientist Michael Lutter said. "But in mice, you can manipulate the expression of the gene and then look at how it changes their behavior."

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 20778 - Posted: 04.10.2015

By RENEE ENGELN ON Tuesday, in the wake of an online petition signed by thousands of people, Facebook announced that it was removing “feeling fat” from its list of status update emoticons. The petition argued that the offending emoticon, with its chubby cheeks and double chin, reinforced negative body images, and Facebook seemed to agree. Is it really such a big deal if you tell everyone how fat you feel? After all, a simple “I’m so fat!” can result in a chorus of empathetic voices, saying, “Me, too!” or “You’re beautiful just the way you are!” And that will help you feel better, and help others feel better, too — right? Wrong. As someone who studies this type of public body self-disparagement, known as “fat talk,” I can say that it probably will make you feel worse. And it may drag down other people with you. Conversational shaming of the body has become practically a ritual of womanhood (though men also engage in it). In a survey that a colleague and I reported in 2011 in the Psychology of Women Quarterly, we found that more than 90 percent of college women reported engaging in fat talk — despite the fact that only 9 percent were actually overweight. In another survey, which we published in December in the Journal of Health Psychology, we canvassed thousands of women ranging in age from 16 to 70. Contrary to the stereotype of fat talk as a young woman’s practice, we found that fat talk was common across all ages and all body sizes. Most important, fat talk is not a harmless social-bonding ritual. According to an analysis of several studies that my colleagues and I published in 2012 in the Psychology of Women Quarterly, fat talk was linked with body shame, body dissatisfaction and eating-disordered behavior. Fat talk does not motivate women to make healthier choices or take care of their bodies; in fact, the feelings of shame it brings about tend to encourage the opposite. © 2015 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 20691 - Posted: 03.17.2015

By KATIE THOMAS The retired tennis player Monica Seles spent this month making the rounds of television talk shows, appearing on everything from “Good Morning America” to “The Dr. Oz Show” to share her personal struggle with binge eating. “It took a while until I felt comfortable talking about it,” she said in a People magazine interview, explaining that she secretly devoured food for years while she was a professional athlete. “That’s one of the reasons I decided to do this campaign: to raise awareness that binge eating is a real medical condition.” But that is not the only reason. Ms. Seles is a paid spokeswoman for Shire, which late last month won approval to market its top-selling drug, Vyvanse, to treat binge-eating disorder, a condition that once existed in the shadow of better-known disorders like anorexia and bulimia but was officially recognized as its own disorder in 2013 by the American Psychiatric Association. As Shire introduces an ambitious campaign to promote Vyvanse but also to raise awareness about the disorder, some are saying the company is going too far to market a drug, a type of amphetamine, that is classified by the federal government as having a high potential for abuse. Shire’s track record is adding to the worry: The company helped put another once-stigmatized condition — attention deficit hyperactivity disorder — on the medical map and made billions of dollars from the sale of drugs, like Vyvanse and Adderall, to treat it. In recent years, federal officials have cited the company for inappropriately marketing Vyvanse and other A.D.H.D. drugs. In addition, some drug safety experts questioned why the Food and Drug Administration so swiftly approved the drug for binge eating — seeking little outside input — despite the fact that, for decades, amphetamines, which suppress the appetite, were widely abused as a treatment for obesity. © 2015 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 20614 - Posted: 02.25.2015

By Aleksandra Sagan, CBC News Photos of emaciated women proudly displaying their protruding hips and ribs, as well as thinspirational quotes "fat-shaming" those who dare to eat, continue to thrive on social media, despite the best attempts by sites like Instagram to temper the reach of the pro-eating disorder community. Some girls gain thousands of followers posting pictures of "thigh gaps" and "bikini bridges," as well as underweight celebrities and thinspirational quotes like model Kate Moss's mantra: "nothing tastes as good as skinny feels." "It just provides a lot of positivity for them, just in a very maladaptive way," says Edward Selby, of the more visual outlet that sites like Instagram provide. An assistant professor of clinical psychology at Rutgers University in New Jersey, Selby is the director of a lab there that studies what makes people more likely to develop anorexia (self-starvation), bulimia (binge-eating and purging) and other eating disorders. About one in 20 young women in Canada has an eating disorder, according to the Toronto-based National Initiative for Eating Disorders. And people suffering from these diseases often feel good after exercising, purging, swallowing a laxative or doing other things that contribute to their illness, Selby says. They get caught in a "cyclic feedback loop," with the positive emotions pushing them to engage more in these risky behaviours. Online pro-anorexia and bulimia communities simply add to that loop by celebrating a person's unhealthy achievements, he says. "Finally under 130! Woohoo!" writes one user with a photo of her feet on a scale. "Yay congrats," reads a response. Another girl posts a screen grab from an app claiming that she's been fasting for more than a day. It receives 32 likes and a "great job" among the comments. ©2015 CBC/Radio-Canada

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 20607 - Posted: 02.24.2015

By Bruce Bower Alexithymia: An inability to find words to describe one’s own feelings Mental health workers regard alexithymia as more akin to a personality trait than to a mental disorder. Many people with psychiatric conditions such as autism spectrum disorder and panic disorder — characterized by physical symptoms with emotional causes — also display alexithymia. Researchers are finding that alexithymia has the same effect on people with and without mental disorders and that it undermines the ability to describe others’ feelings as well as one’s own. A study appearing online January 21 in Royal Society Open Science found that nine of 21 young women with eating disorders had difficulty recognizing others’ facial emotions and that this characteristic was probably related to alexithymia, not some inherent feature of anorexia or bulimia. The researchers also looked at 21 women who had alexithymia but no psychiatric disorders and found that seven had comparable problems identifying others’ expressions of happiness, fear and other emotions. Citations R. Brewer et al. Emotion recognition deficits in eating disorders are explained by co-occurring alexithymia. Royal Society Open Science. Published online January 21, 2015. doi: 10.1098/rsos.140382. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2015.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 20513 - Posted: 01.23.2015

By Melissa Healy A pill may help those whose out-of-control eating is a cause of extreme distress An ADHD drug may offer hope for a different psychiatric disorder Binge eating disorder, a newly recognized condition in which bouts of voracious eating lead to guilt, shame and often obesity, may yield to lisdexamfetamine (marketed as Vyvanse), a medication that has been used for several years to treat attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder in children and adults. In an 11-week clinical trial that tested a range of Vyvanse dosages, researchers found that, compared to those taking a placebo pill, subjects diagnosed with binge eating disorder who took a daily 50 or 70 mg dose of the ADHD drug had fewer binge eating episodes, were more likely to cease binge eating for a four-week period, reported greater improvement in their functioning, and lost substantially more weight. The findings, published online early in the journal JAMA Psychiatry on Wednesday, offer early evidence that patients whose consumption patterns are punctuated by episodes of out-of-control eating may be helped by some medication. The disorder, which has in recent years won wider recognition by the psychiatric establishment, has traditionally been treated with psychotherapy. It has proved a difficult condition to treat. Among those getting lisdexamfetamine, side effects were similar to those experienced by adults who take the medication to treat symptoms of ADHD, including dry mouth, difficulty falling asleep, increased heart rate and headaches. Adverse events prompted six of 196 subjects in the active arm of treatment to withdraw from the study.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment; Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment; Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 20492 - Posted: 01.17.2015

BY Ashley Yeager A protein made by gut bacteria may trigger a chain of interactions in the body that contribute to eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia. When the protein is produced, the body makes antibodies to bind to it, but the antibodies also attach to a hormone that controls fullness. In tests, mice given bacteria that produce the protein changed how much they ate compared with mice given bacteria that did not make the protein, a new study shows. Researchers also found that the antibodies to the protein were higher in patients with anorexia and bulimia. The results, which appear October 7 in Translational Psychiatry, seem to be some of the earliest to link gut bacteria to eating disorders. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2014.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 20188 - Posted: 10.11.2014

by Bethany Brookshire Many of us have experienced that depressing sight: The bottom of the ice cream pint. You get to the end of your favorite movie and suddenly realize the ice cream is gone — and you’re far too full for comfort. We’re left wondering why we did it. But when it comes to forgetting ourselves and bingeing on the pint, the power of habit can be strong. It could be that our previous eating experiences make us helpless to our habits. A new study in rats, published April 2 in the Journal of Neuroscience, shows that long-term exposure to bursts of sweet, fatty foods produces animals that appear to seek food not out of hunger, but out of habit. And neural changes associated with habit formation accompany the behavioral changes. The results suggest that repeated binges on sugar and fat could tilt the neural balance from taking a few scoops of Cherry Garcia toward mindlessly reaching the bottom of the bowl. But while the results show us the power of habit, bad habits don’t necessarily make us food addicts. Teri Furlong and her colleagues at the University of Sydney in Australia were interested in how animals control behaviors. Some behaviors are goal-directed, while others are more efficiently taken care of with habits. Furlong describes habits as “behaviors where we are not thinking about the consequences as we do them.” Many habits can be useful things to develop — eating breakfast daily or brushing your teeth, for example. But other habits can become maladaptive, such as drug abuse — or binge eating. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment; Chapter 4: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment; Chapter 3: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology
Link ID: 19519 - Posted: 04.22.2014

By Helen Briggs BBC News Young men with an eating disorder are not getting the help and support they need because of a perceptions about a "women's illness", say researchers. Men are underdiagnosed and undertreated for anorexia and other eating disorders, despite making up about a quarter of cases, a UK study suggests. Frontline health workers have a key role in identifying eating disorders in young men, they report in BMJ Open. Men are under pressure to have the "ideal" body image, says a charity. Researchers from the University of Oxford and University of Glasgow interviewed 39 young people aged 16 to 25, including 10 men, about their experiences of diagnosis, treatment and support for eating disorders. They say young men with eating disorders were "underdiagnosed, undertreated and underresearched". This is partly because the men themselves were unaware of the symptoms, despite purging, not eating for days or obsessive calorie counting, they said. "Our findings suggest that men may experience particular problems in recognising that they may have an eating disorder as a result of the continuing cultural construction of eating disorders as uniquely or predominantly a female problem," said Dr Ulla Raisanen and Dr Kate Hunt. One man said he thought eating disorders only affected "fragile teenage girls"; another said he thought eating disorders were "something girls got"; while one was told by his doctor to "man up". Others said they often had to wait a long time for specialist referral and had sometimes been misdiagnosed. GPs and other professionals such as teachers have a key role in improving the outlook for men with eating disorders by challenging misconceptions, the researchers said. BBC © 2014

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment; Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 19469 - Posted: 04.10.2014