By RANDI HUTTER EPSTEIN Margie Hodgin, a nurse in Kernersville, N.C., had struggled to lose weight since she was a teenager. But it wasn't until she turned 40 that she finally took off the extra pounds, and then some. Margie Hodgin, a nurse in Kernersville, N.C., had struggled to lose weight since she was a teenager. But it wasn’t until she turned 40 that she finally took off the extra pounds, and then some. “It was a real sense of empowerment, that I can do this all on my own and no one is helping me, and I’m achieving what I want and fitting into my clothes better,” she said of her initial delight in shedding the excess weight. But what started as discipline transformed into disorder. Ms. Hodgin would not eat more than 200 calories a meal, and if she did, she made herself vomit. She surfed pro-ANA, or pro-anorexia, Web sites for advice. She knew that what she was doing was wrong — more like adolescent, she said — but she figured she was only hurting herself. Meanwhile, her chronic state of starvation was triggering wild mood swings. It was only after she and her husband had several therapy sessions that she came to realize that her eating disorder was wreaking havoc on him, as well as their three boys. Copyright 2009 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: 13053 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Trisha Gura A recent tabloid captured the common wisdom about anorexia nervosa. In an interview, actor Christina Ricci blamed the pressures of success for her prior struggle with the disease. The headline flashed, “Ricci: Hollywood made me anorexic.” But did it? True, anorexia is characterized by compulsive dieting or exercise to get thin. And the pursuit of thinness in contemporary culture—particularly in Hollywood—has become a seemingly contagious obsession. Yet there is thin, and then there is emaciated. Crossing over that line means a loss of a basic survival instinct—to eat in response to hunger—that culture should not be able to touch. What is more, cultural cues cannot easily explain why the afflicted, who are shockingly skinny, misperceive themselves as fat. Anorexics also say they feel more energetic and alert when starving: starvation boosts their metabolic rate, which is in stark contrast to the slowing of metabolism that occurs in most people during a fast. Such mysteries cry out for a biological explanation. To find one, researchers are probing the brains of anorexics; their work is painting a new picture of anorexia as a multifaceted mental illness whose effects extend far beyond appetite. The illness is accompanied by disturbances in the brain’s reward circuitry that may lead to a general inability to feel delight from life’s pleasures, be they food, sex or winning the lottery. As such, the ailment shares characteristics with drug addiction—the drug in this case being deprivation itself. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc

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: 11711 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN You don’t have to search very hard to find the excruciating online videos known as thinspiration, or thinspo. Photomontages of skeletal women, including some celebrities and models, play all over the Internet, uploaded from the United States, Germany, Holland and elsewhere. These videos are designed to “inspire” viewers — to fortify their ambitions. But exactly which ambitions? To lose weight, presumably. To stop losing weight, possibly. Thinspo videos profess a range of ideologies, often pressing morbid images into double service, as both goads and deterrents to anorexia. Thinspiration videos are a cryptic art with rigid rules, as much a formula as a form. As listless, pounding or archly chipper music plays, still photos of one wraith after another surface and fade. The women are generally solitary and sullen, or entirely faceless. Bony self-portraits, created in bathroom mirrors by anonymous photographers, have faces that have been obscured or cropped out. Many figures in the videos are supine, as in the pervasive hipbone self-portrait, which seems to be shot by a photographer on her back aiming a camera at her abdomen and the waistband of her jeans. A bird’s-eye shot of the thighless legs of a seated figure is also common. The soundtracks to thinspiration videos, some of which feature songs explicitly about starvation, are not subtle. Skeleton, you are my friend. I will sacrifice all I have in life. Bones are beautiful. Hey, baby, can you bleed like me? Filmmakers are reticent with commentary. If they explain their images in any way, it’s with oddly peppy title cards (“Enjoy!” “Thanks for watching!”) or a series of unsigned quotations, compiled as if for a commonplace book. A thinspiration auteur makes her voice heard almost exclusively through these cards, and she sometimes uses them to plead with her audience to go easy on her work or to stay tuned for further thinspo. I’ve never seen a thinspo video with a voice-over or even moving images. Copyright 2008 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: 11666 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The brains of women who suffer from anorexia nervosa may actually respond to taste differently, according to research published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology. The report suggests that women with anorexia might not experience the rewards from eating that non-anorexics do. Psychiatrist Walter Kaye, who led the study, says the findings may explain how people with anorexia are able to starve themselves, sometimes to the point of death. "Food may not be as rewarding as it is to people without an eating disorder,” Kaye says. “And this may very well explain why they're able to not eat, and lose so much weight." He says the brains of anorexics may not be producing “a very robust signal driving eating behavior,” even when the body needs food. Karen Pearlman, a sports journalist who struggled with anorexia during her teenage years, recalls “not really caring about” she ate. “Just the least amount possible,” she says. One winter, Pearlman dropped from 120 to 85 pounds. In the spring, when warmer weather meant shorts and t-shirts, Pearlman’s parents saw how thin their daughter had become, and they took her to get help. Now 41 years old, Pearlman reports a full recovery, but she says it took time—she was still dealing with body image issues into her twenties. “It becomes so, like part of who you are. It’s very hard to let that go,” she explains. © ScienCentral, 2000-2008.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment; Chapter 9: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment; Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell
Link ID: 11351 - Posted: 06.24.2010

While eating less, purging and exercising to stay slim are still largely the preoccupations of teenage girls, teenage boys are increasingly following suit, a sweeping new U.S. study has found. Researchers found that between 1995 and 2005, 54 per cent of girls in their study reported they dieted, while 10 per cent said they used diet products, eight per cent admitted to purging, 67 per cent exercised, and 43 per cent exercised vigorously to lose weight. And among male teenagers, the researchers found that the prevalence of weight-control behaviours rose. Over the same time period, 24 per cent of boys overall reported that they dieted — with the prevalence rising almost every year in the 10-year study period. The researchers, at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., studied data from 1995 to 2005 gleaned by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention via a biennial survey of high-school students in grades nine to 12. The data were self-reported, with students categorizing themselves as "white," "black" or "Hispanic" in questionnaires. The findings were published Oct. 29 ahead of print in the International Journal of Eating Disorders. © CBC 2007

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: 10991 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The Canadian Press Female students who leave home to attend first-year university or college are significantly more likely to start binge eating than peers who stay home to attend school — a behaviour that puts them at risk for more serious eating disorders in the future, new research suggests. A study of University of Alberta students found that females in their inaugural year were three times more likely to binge eat if they had left their parents' home to obtain post-secondary education. Repeated bouts of eating large amounts of food at a single sitting can also pack on the pounds over time, setting the stage for obesity, diabetes and other health problems, says the study. (CBC) As well, female students who reported higher levels of dissatisfaction with their bodies had a three-fold greater risk of binge eating episodes, say the researchers, whose study is published in the October issue of the Journal of Youth and Adolescence. Lead researcher Erin Barker, who earned her PhD in developmental psychology at the Edmonton-based university, said young women who scored low on social adjustment also were more apt to binge eat. © The Canadian Press, 2007

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: 10822 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A report by the organizers of London Fashion Week is calling for children under the age of 16 to be banned from the catwalk. The British Fashion Council report also recommends models be screened for eating disorders, but stops short of recommending they be disqualified from Fashion Week for being too thin. The report, written by a panel of fashion designers, models and an eating-disorder specialist, asks modelling agencies to certify that their models have been examined for eating disorders. It recommends that starting next fall, models arrange and pay for the certification themselves from an accredited list of medical experts. The panel states that models are part of an at-risk group of professionals that includes athletes, classical ballet dancers and jockeys. It estimates up to 40 per cent of those working in such professions have eating disorders, compared with an estimated three per cent of the overall population. "The facts of the modelling profession are not so glamorous; it is peopled by young and potentially vulnerable workers — the majority of them women — who are self-employed and do not have adequate support," the report's authors write. © CBC 2007

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: 10744 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JANE E. BRODY This month, researchers at Harvard published a survey finding that binge eating is by far the most common eating disorder, occurring in 1 in 35 adults, or 2.8 percent — almost twice the combined rate for anorexia (0.6 percent) and bulimia (1 percent). Yet unlike the other two, binge-eating disorder is still not considered a formal diagnosis by the American Psychiatric Association. I’m mystified as to why, and when you read my story you may wonder as well. It was 1964, I was 23 and working at my first newspaper job in Minneapolis, 1,250 miles from my New York home. My love life was in disarray, my work was boring, my boss was a misogynist. And I, having been raised to associate love and happiness with food, turned to eating for solace. Of course, I began to gain weight and, of course, I periodically went on various diets to try to lose what I’d gained, only to relapse and regain all I’d lost and then some. My many failed attempts included the Drinking Man’s Diet, popular at the time, which at least enabled me to stay connected with my hard-partying colleagues. Before long, desperation set in. When I found myself unable to stop eating once I’d started, I resolved not to eat during the day. Then, after work and out of sight, the bingeing began. Copyright 2007 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: 9997 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By HARRIET BROWN On a sweltering evening in July of last year, I sat at the end of my daughter Kitty's bed, holding a milkshake made from a cup of Häagen-Dazs coffee ice cream and a cup of whole milk. Kitty (the pet name we've used since she was a baby) shivered, wrapped in a thick quilt. "Here's your milkshake," I said, aiming for a tone that was friendly but firm, a tone that would make her reach for the glass and begin drinking. Six-hundred ninety calories — that's what this milkshake represented to me. But to Kitty it was the object of her deepest fear and loathing. "You're trying to make me fat," she said in a high-pitched, distorted voice that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. She rocked, clutching her stomach, chanting over and over: "I'm a fat pig. I'm so fat." That summer, Kitty was 14. She was 4-foot-11 and weighed 71 pounds. I could see the angles and curves of each bone under her skin. Her hair, once shiny, was lank and falling out in clumps. Her breath carried the odor of ketosis, the sour smell of the starving body digesting itself. I kept my voice neutral. "You need to drink the milkshake," I repeated. She lifted her head, and for a second I saw the 2-year-old Kitty, her mouth quirked in a half-smile, her dark eyes full of humor. It was enough to keep me from shrieking: Just drink the damn milkshake! Enough to keep me sitting on the end of the bed for the next two hours, talking in a low voice, lifting the straw to her lips over and over. The milkshake had long since melted when she swallowed the last of it, curled up in bed and closed her eyes. Her gaunt face stayed tense even in sleep. Copyright 2006 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: 9668 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By TINA KELLEY NEWARK, — A New Jersey couple filed suit against Aetna Inc., the Hartford-based insurance company, on Wednesday, claiming that it refused to fully cover their daughter’s treatment for anorexia. More Multimedia: Slide Show: At the Polls Slide Show: Spitzer on the Trail The suit was filed in United States District Court here. The couple, Cliff and Maria DeAnna of Mountainside, N.J., said Aetna refused to pay for nearly 10 weeks of their daughter’s inpatient treatment, saying her eating disorder was not “biologically based.” Insurers have balked at covering mental illnesses that they say do not have a proven physiological basis. Ms. DeAnna, who declined to provide her daughter’s given name for privacy reasons, said by phone that she had been hospitalized for 101 days so far this year but that Aetna U.S. Healthcare H.M.O. would pay for only 35 inpatient days. Symptoms of anorexia include excessive dieting and exercise and a distorted belief that one is overweight. The case is an example of what advocates for the mentally ill call longstanding inequities in insurance coverage for psychological ailments. The family’s lawyer, Bruce Nagel, said state law required insurers to provide the same coverage for mental and nervous conditions as for physiological diseases, like heart ailments or emphysema. The suit estimates that hundreds of people in New Jersey have had similar difficulties receiving coverage, and it seeks certification as a class action. Ms. DeAnna estimates that her family has paid almost $100,000 in medical bills this year alone, with the help of a home equity loan. Her daughter, who is 20 and stands 5-foot-6, weighed 102 pounds when she last went into the hospital. Copyright 2006 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: 9603 - Posted: 06.24.2010

RESTON, Va.— The role of the brain’s opioid receptor system—or endorphin system—may hold the key to understanding and treating bulimia nervosa, according to research reported in the Society of Nuclear Medicine’s August issue of the Journal of Nuclear Medicine. "Involvement of the opioid system may explain the addictive quality of this behavioral disorder," said Angela Guarda, M.D., assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Md. The first imaging study to implicate the opioid system in bulimia nervosa shows differences in women with bulimia compared to healthy women, added J. James Frost, M.D., Ph.D., professor of radiology and neuroscience at Johns Hopkins and co-author of "Regional ì-Opioid Receptor Binding in Insular Cortex Is Decreased in Bulimia Nervosa and Correlates Inversely With Fasting Behavior." In the study, eight women with bulimia were compared to healthy women of the same age and weight. Their brains were scanned using positron emission tomography (PET) after injection with the short-acting radioactive compound carfentanil, which binds to mu-opioid receptors in the brain, explained Frost. PET is a powerful medical imaging procedure that noninvasively uses special imaging systems and radioactive tracers to produce pictures of the function and metabolism of the cells in the body. He noted, "We found that mu-opioid receptor binding in bulimic women was lower than in healthy women in the left insular cortex. The insula is involved in processing taste, as well as the anticipation and reward of eating, and has been implicated in studies of other driven behavioral disorders, including drug addiction and gambling.” Copyright © 2005 SNM

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 4: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology; Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 3: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology; Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 7764 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NANCY WARTIK Dr. Katharine A. Phillips thought she knew a lot about mental illness. As a psychiatric resident at Harvard from 1988 to 1991, she was well versed in ailments like depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. But one day, when a distraught patient said his hair was the cause of all his misery, Dr. Phillips was stymied. Searching the psychiatric literature, she found references to an obscure diagnosis known as body dysmorphic disorder, or B.D.D. Its sufferers, she learned, are tormented by the notion that some part of their body — hair, nose, skin, hips — is ugly, abnormal or deformed, when it actually is not. Their obsessions with the imagined flaws may cause them to spend hours staring in mirrors, to shun other people, to seek unnecessary cosmetic surgery or even attempt suicide. "If you haven't known someone with B.D.D., it's easy to trivialize it," she said. "But if you see how devastating this disorder can be, you take it very seriously." Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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: 4232 - Posted: 06.24.2010

There's a general perception that eating disorders like anorexia primarily affect white girls. "When you read, in the media for example, about eating disorders, invariably they are portrayed as problems of white women," says Ruth Striegel-Moore, a psychology professor at Wesleyan University. As shown on PBS's NOVA, 8 million people in America, mostly young women, suffer from anorexia, or self-starvation. But does it equally affect all races? "There aren’t a lot of large, systematic studies that have looked at that question," says Striegel-Moore, who recently published a study looking at the race and anorexia in the American Journal of Psychiatry. So Striegel-Moore and her team surveyed 2,046 young black and white women with an average age of 21, and found that black women were less likely to get certain eating disorders—especially anorexia. "We found no case of a black young woman with anorexia nervosa in this study," says Striegel-Moore. "We’re not looking at risk factors for anorexia nervosa in this study, but what may be going on is that black women are…under less pressure to be super thin. In fact, there’s quite a bit of research that shows that black women prefer to be moderately thin—they don’t want to be skinny-thin—whereas white women…you can never be thin enough, so to speak, as a body ideal. So as a culture, black culture may have protective factors, so that even if a black woman may have the genetic vulnerability to anorexia nervosa, it may not get expressed because she grows up in a context that may be protective." © ScienCentral, 2000-2003.

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: 4087 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By MARY DUENWALD Did you know that it's Beautiful Women Month?" a frequently forwarded e-mail message asks, before making a few pertinent statements. Here's a sampling: "Marilyn Monroe wore a size 14"; "If Barbie was a real woman, she'd have to walk on all fours"; and "The average woman weighs 144 lb. and wears between a 12-14." There are more "facts on figures," not all of them are perfectly accurate. Ms. Monroe, who was 5 feet 5 1/2 inches and weighed between 118 to 135 pounds, may have been just busty enough to fill out a size 14, but partly because sizes were smaller in the 1950's. And Barbie is indeed disproportionate — a 1995 study found that for a woman with an average body type to attain Barbie's shape, she would need to grow 24 inches (making her more than 7 feet tall), take 6 inches off her waist and add 5 to her chest. But if she came to life, she could presumably still walk upright, the director of the study said. As for the average woman's weight today, it has jumped to 152 pounds in the 90's from 144 in the late 70's.

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: 3960 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS BOSTON, — Binge eaters who say they cannot help it may have a point. A study suggests a gene may contribute to the cause of binge eating in some people. Researchers said they hoped the finding would point the way to a pill that could bring appetites under control. The Swiss-German-American study makes the strongest case yet that a genetic mutation can cause an eating disorder, the researchers say. Researchers generally believe that eating behavior is complex and cultural in its causes. Copyright 2003 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: 3586 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By GINIA BELLAFANTE IN her 23 years as a specialist in eating disorders, Dr. Margo Maine has received countless telephone calls from women worried that their teenage daughters might be dieting into a danger zone. But several years ago, Dr. Maine, a psychologist who runs an eating-disorders treatment program with a partner in West Hartford, Conn., noticed a shift in the telephone inquiries. "Increasingly, our calls began to include a significant number of adults seeking help not for their children but for themselves," Dr. Maine said. Some of those callers — women in their late 40's and early 50's — were relapsing after overcoming eating disorders in their youth, and others were experiencing them for the first time. Naomi Burton Isaacs, a public relations executive in New York, had been obsessed about her weight most of her life, she said, but it was only at age 45 that her dieting grew extreme and she developed an addiction to laxatives. She swallowed 25 pills a day. Ms. Burton Isaacs, who is 5-foot-9, withered to 105 pounds. Copyright 2003 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: 3530 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By HARRIET BROWN We stood in front of the freezer case at the grocery store, my 16-year-old daughter, Kitty, and I. It was late, and I was tired, but we had come out for a few items that couldn’t wait until morning. One of them was ice cream. “How about this vanilla?” I asked, rubbing away condensation on the freezer door to peer at a label. Then I shook my head and said: “Never mind. It’s 140 calories a half-cup.” I opened the door, rummaged and pulled out a different pint of vanilla. That one was also 140 calories. Not good enough. Meanwhile, my daughter was a few cases away, holding up a pint of coffee ice cream. Together we read the back of the carton and rejected it. A pint of caramel cappuccino swirl was an improvement, but I thought we could do better. And I was right. We took home three pints of Häagen-Dazs coffee ice cream, with 270 calories in every half-cup. Like many Americans, I can be obsessive about reading food labels. Only I’m looking for more calories, not fewer, because my daughter Kitty is in recovery from anorexia. Her weight has been restored for more than a year, and in many ways she is as normal as a teenager gets. But when it comes to eating, she still has to pay attention in a different way. Copyright 2007 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: 11078 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By PAUL SCOTT FOR a runner, Alex DeVinny wasn’t all that skinny on the day that she won a state track title in 2003. At 17, she was 5-foot-8 and weighed 125 pounds. Few people watching her run the 3,200 meters in 10 minutes 53 seconds would have guessed that she had had symptoms of an eating disorder since age 9 and that she had yet to start menstruating. Her coach didn’t know. The college recruiters certainly did not know. She was never going to run for those colleges. The summer after she won the title, Ms. DeVinny, from Racine, Wis., began to run even harder and eat even less. When she came out for cross-country in the fall, she looked frail and underweight. Her coach was concerned enough to prevent her from competing in several meets, but he allowed her to do two-thirds of her training. He never asked about her menstrual periods and did not know about her anorexia. Ms. DeVinny sneaked in extra workouts, but her dazzling window of athleticism had already begun to close. “Her body kind of broke down during her senior year,” said her sister Gabby Fekete, 27. “She had lived on adrenaline.” Last March, Ms. DeVinny died from cardiac arrest related to her starvation. She was 20 and weighed roughly 70 pounds. Looking back, her coach, Dan Jarrett, questions himself. “I did not understand how someone with anorexia would be capable of making decisions that weren’t in their best interest,” he said. “I totally failed to grasp what it meant.” He is so troubled by her death that he has since quit coaching girls. Copyright 2006 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: 9345 - Posted: 06.24.2010

For years we’ve been told to blame our obsession with thinness on society's glorification of it, and that eating disorders like anorexia were "social diseases." But research shows that genetics likely plays a big role too. "If there's any disorder that's going to be caused by both nature and nurture, it's something like an eating disorder," says Cynthia Bulik, professor of psychiatry and director of the eating disorders program at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "It was believed for a long time that these were socio-cultural disorders, that somehow our culture or the emphasis on thinness caused anorexia. But we know now that that's not entirely true." The first sign of a genetic link came from surveys of families where anorexia appeared. "Family studies show that if you have a family member who has an eating disorder, you're between seven and twelve times at greater risk for developing an eating disorder yourself," says Bulik. "What we can't tell from family studies is whether the reason something runs in a family is because of genes or environment. So we've done twin studies to ask that question and we've found indeed that anorexia is a strongly heritable condition." © ScienCentral, 2000-2003

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: 4064 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D. Marya Hornbacher is a virtuoso writer: humorous, articulate and self-aware. She is also, as she has now documented in two books, incurably mentally ill. Even on the best possible treatment, Ms. Hornbacher tiptoes along the same high wire as Plath, Lowell, Woolf and the rest of the unbalanced artistes. Off medication, she reliably falls into a turmoil of confused self-destruction, which, as she would be the first to acknowledge, means heartbreak and worry for her friends and relatives, challenges for her doctors, and, in the age-old contradiction, new fodder for her muse. For scientists trying to parse the mystery of brain and mind, she is one more case of the possible link between mental illness and artistic creativity. With all our scans and neurotransmitters, we are not much closer to figuring out that relationship than was Lord Byron, who announced that poets are “all crazy” and left it at that. But effective drugs make the question more urgent now: would Virginia Woolf, medicated, have survived to write her final masterpiece, or would she have spent her extra years happily shopping? Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment; Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment; Chapter 12: Psychopathology: The Biology of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 11568 - Posted: 06.24.2010