Associations of food addiction and nonsuicidal self‐injury among women with an eating disorder: A common strategy for regulating emotions?

Abstract

Objective We examined the association between lifetime nonsuicidal self‐injury (NSSI), emotion regulation, and food addiction (FA) in women (n = 220) with eating disorders (ED) compared with (n = 121) healthy controls (HC). Method Participants were assessed via face‐to‐face interviews for ED diagnosis and lifetime NSSI. FA was assessed with Yale Food Addiction Scale 2.0 and emotion regulation using the Difficulty in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS). Results The prevalence of FA was significantly higher among women with an ED when compared with HC (75.9% vs. 4.1%, p < 0.001). Similarly, subjects presenting FA showed a high prevalence of lifetime NSSI, in both ED and HC (40.7% and 60.0%, respectively). Our predictive model revealed FA and DERS total scores as indicators of the presence of lifetime NSSI independent of group assignment, ED diagnosis, and age. Conclusions These findings suggest a shared aetiology between ED, NSSI, and FA, explained possibly in part by emotion‐regulation deficits.

Emotional Response Inhibition: A Shared Neurocognitive Deficit in Eating Disorder Symptoms and Nonsuicidal Self-Injury

“…NSSI and ED symptoms frequently co-occur, and scholars have proposed that certain ED behaviors may be conceptualized as "indirect" types of self-injury [1,5]. Although often treated as clinically distinct phenomena, NSSI and ED behaviors may share common functions (e.g., causing physical damage to one's body and providing emotional relief [13][14][15]24]) and risk factors (e.g., impulsive responsivity to negative affect [10][11][12][34][35][36]43,44]). Our findings support the latter possibility, given that both negative urgency and poor negative emotional response inhibition were modestly associated with NSSI and ED symptoms in bivariate analyses.…”

“…However, negative urgency and NEAT dysfunction capture separate variance in the prediction of ED-related cognitions and behaviors, distinct from the pattern of results we previously observed in NSSI.Brain Sci. 2020, 10, 104 2 of 17 of diverse self-injurious behaviors [12][13][14][15][16] and a putative non-specific marker of general vulnerability for psychopathology [17,18]. Consistent with this notion, the most commonly reported function of NSSI and ED behaviors is to reduce negative affect [19][20][21][22][23][24][25].…”

Food addiction, eating addiction and eating disorders

“…Other researchers however argue that food addiction and eating disorders are two different constructs (70)(71)(72) . That is, cognitive control and disinhibition of eating behaviour have been established in the aetiology of eating disorders (47,73) ; however these cognitions are not evidenced in food addiction (33) .…”

The Impact of Retrospective Childhood Maltreatment on Eating Disorders as Mediated by Food Addiction: A Cross-Sectional Study

“…Interestingly, however, in this study, the relationship between FA and PTSD did not differ by trauma type [ 13 ]. Furthermore, the co-occurrence of FA symptoms with emotional dysregulation symptoms has led to the suggestion that these might share common characteristics and, potentially, risk factors [ 14 ]. In further support of this, when compared to individuals without addictive behaviors, both women with FA and women with substance use presented higher levels of depressive and PTSD symptoms, as well as greater emotion dysregulation [ 15 ].…”