MONDAY, Oct. 4 — Family-based treatment for anorexic teenagers may be more effective in the long-term than individual counseling, a new study finds. "Family therapy has been part of the landscape for the treatment of anorexia nervosa for maybe 40 years, but this specific form has been evolving as a likely effective treatment for the last 10," said Dr. James Lock, lead author of a study in the October issue of Archives of General Psychiatry. "But this is the first study to actually compare this treatment to an active treatment." Anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder most common among teenage girls, can stunt growth, delay puberty and reduce peak bone mass. Almost 6 percent of anorexics die from heart failure or suicide each decade, the authors write. …

WEDNESDAY, June 2 — Patients suffering from the eating disorder anorexia nervosa can actually lose brain volume, but new research suggests that, with special treatment, adult patients can regain the gray matter that they lost from relentless dieting. "Anorexia nervosa wreaks havoc on many different parts of the body, including the brain," study author Christina Roberto, of Yale University, said in a news release. "In our study, we measured brain volume deficits among underweight patients with the illness to evaluate if the decline is reversible through short-term weight restoration." Working out of the Columbia University Center for Eating Disorders in New York City, Roberto and her colleagues conducted MRI scans of the brains of 32 adult female inpatients diagnosed…

THURSDAY, April 28 — Margie Hodgin of Turnersville, N.C., was in her early forties when she developed anorexia nervosa, and she knows how isolating the condition can be. "In the middle of a disorder like that, you don't know how to explain your feelings to those around you," she said. Luckily, Hodgin sought the care of a therapist who suggested a new and often effective treatment: an intensive counseling program that also involved Hodgin's husband. She said the program, called Uniting Couples (in the treatment of) Anorexia Nervosa (UCAN), was probably more effective — both for her own recovery and her marriage — than other outpatient programs she had gone to alone because she and her husband could get "down and dirty" about what was …

WEDNESDAY, Feb. 16 — The way women draw themselves may help reveal whether they have an eating disorder, researchers suggest. They found that women with anorexia or bulimia draw themselves with different characteristics than women without eating disorders. The study, by Israeli researchers, included 36 women with anorexia or bulimia and 40 women with no eating disorder, half of them overweight and half normal weight. The women were asked to draw themselves, and the researchers found various differences between the groups in four areas: Women with anorexia or bulimia tended to portray themselves with a larger neck, a disconnected neck or no neck. The mouth was more emphasized by women with anorexia or bulimia. Depictions of wider thighs were more common among participants with…

MONDAY, Nov. 29 — Eating disorders have risen steadily in children and teens over the last few decades, with some of the sharpest increases occurring in boys and minority youths, according to a new report. In one startling statistic cited in the report, an analysis by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality found that hospitalizations for eating disorders jumped by 119 percent between 1999 and 2006 for kids younger than 12. At the same time as severe cases of anorexia and bulimia have risen, so too have "partial-syndrome" eating disorders — young people who have some, but not all, of the symptoms of an eating disorder. Athletes, including gymnasts and wrestlers, and performers, including dancers and models, may be particularly at risk, according to the report. "We…

WEDNESDAY, Nov. 3 — Women with anorexia nervosa are much more likely to have unplanned pregnancies and abortions than women without the eating disorder, a study of Norwegian women has found. This may be due to the mistaken belief that women with anorexia can't get pregnant because they have irregular menstrual periods or no periods at all, said study lead author Cynthia M. Bulik, director of the eating disorders program at the University of North Carolina (UNC). "Anorexia is not a good contraceptive. Just because you're not menstruating, or because you're menstruating irregularly, doesn't mean you're not at risk for becoming pregnant," she said in a UNC news release. Bulik and colleagues analyzed data on 62,060 women included in the Norwegian Mother…

THURSDAY, Aug. 23 — People with the eating disorder anorexia have difficulty judging their own body size but are able to size up others accurately, a small new study finds. The study included 25 people with anorexia and 25 people without the disorder who were shown a door-like opening and asked to judge whether they or other people in the room could pass through it. In earlier experiments, people with anorexia felt they could not pass through the door even if it was easily wide enough. In this study, people with anorexia were more accurate at judging whether other people could fit through the door than whether they could. The researchers also found a link between the anorexia patients' ability to fit through the door and their body size prior …

WEDNESDAY, Dec. 28 — Eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia are typically thought to be diseases of young women and men. But researchers are finding that the personal demons that drive a young person to an eating disorder may linger into adulthood. More and more middle-aged and older people are coming forward to receive treatment for eating problems that began in their youth and have been reignited by adult stress or personal crises. "Some had actual eating disorders" when they were younger, and "others had aspects of an eating disorder but were never fully treated," said Dr. Ed Tyson, an eating disorders specialist in Austin, Texas. "Then something happens later in life that stresses them to a point where the eating disorder becomes …

THURSDAY, Aug. 4 — Women with the eating disorders anorexia and bulimia may take a bit longer to get pregnant than other women, a new study has found. U.K. researchers asked 11,088 pregnant women to complete questionnaires at 12 and 18 weeks of gestation. Of those women, 171 (1.5 percent) had anorexia at some point in their lives, 199 (1.8 percent) had bulimia, and another 82 (0.7 percent) had experienced both conditions. A larger proportion of the women with the eating disorders took more than six months to conceive compared to those with no history of eating disorders (39.5 percent vs 25 percent). However, women with eating disorders weren't more likely to take longer than 12 months to conceive, the investigators found. Women with anorexia or bulimia were more than twice as…

FRIDAY, March 28, 2014 — It's said you can never be too rich or too thin, but new research suggests otherwise. People who are clinically underweight face an even higher risk for dying than obese individuals, the study shows. Compared to normal-weight folks, the excessively thin have nearly twice the risk of death, researchers concluded after reviewing more than 50 prior studies. Obesity has occupied center stage under the public health spotlight, but "we have [an] obligation to ensure that we avoid creating an epidemic of underweight adults and fetuses who are otherwise at the correct weight," said study leader Dr. Joel Ray, a physician-researcher at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto. The findings appear in the March 28 issue of the Journal of Epidemiology and Public…

THURSDAY, March 13, 2014 — A small, preliminary study hints that a hormone connected to positive feelings could help ease obsessions with food and obesity in people with anorexia. "Patients with anorexia have a range of social difficulties, which often start in their early teenage years before the onset of the illness," senior study author Janet Treasure, of the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London, in England, said in a university news release. "These social problems, which can result in isolation, may be important in understanding both the onset and maintenance of anorexia," Treasure said. "By using [the hormone] oxytocin as a potential treatment for anorexia, we are focusing on some of these underlying problems we see in patients." Oxytocin…

WEDNESDAY, Aug. 28 — Teens with anorexia nervosa have bigger brains than those without the eating disorder, a finding that suggests biology may play a larger role in the condition than realized. Specifically, the teenage girls with anorexia had a larger insula, a part of the brain that is active when you taste food, and a larger orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain that tells you when to stop eating, said researchers from the University of Colorado School of Medicine. "While eating disorders are often triggered by the environment, there are most likely biological mechanisms that have to come together for an individual to develop an eating disorder such as anorexia nervosa," Dr. Guido Frank, an assistant professor of psychiatry and neuroscience, said in a university …