These findings support the view that body checking and avoidance are direct expressions of the overevaluation of shape and weight. Further work is needed to determine whether these expressions contribute to the maintenance of eating disorders.
Childhood and adolescence are critical periods of neural development and physical growth. The malnutrition and related medical complications resulting from eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa (AN), bulimia nervosa (BN) and eating disorder not otherwise specified may have more severe and potentially more protracted consequences during youth than during other age periods. The consensus opinion of an international workgroup of experts on the diagnosis and treatment of child and adolescent eating disorders is that (a) lower and more developmentally sensitive thresholds of symptom severity (e.g. lower frequency of purging behaviours, significant deviations from growth curves as indicators of clinical severity) be used as diagnostic boundaries for children and adolescents, (b) behavioural indicators of psychological features of eating disorders be considered even in the absence of direct self-report of such symptoms and (c) multiple informants (e.g. parents) be used to ascertain symptom profiles. Collectively, these recommendations will permit earlier identification and intervention to prevent the exacerbation of eating disorder symptoms.
The reported abnormalities of brain function in anorexia nervosa (AN) include impairment of neural circuits involving cortical (orbito-frontal, somatosensory and parietal) and sub-cortical (amygdala, hippocampus, thalamus, hypothalamus and striatum) structures. The insular cortex serves an integrative function for all the structures relevant to the features of AN and as such may be central to this impairment. We hypothesise that a rate limiting dysfunction of neural circuitry integrated by the insula can account for the clinical phenomena of AN. Such dysfunction could account for the known psychopathology, neuroimaging abnormalities and neuropsychological deficits. Proposals to test this hypothesis are made.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.