US researchers conducting the first national survey of eating disorders have described binge eating disorder as a major public health burden.
The study is published in the current edition of the journal Biological Psychiatry.
The research was led by Dr James Hudson, Director of the Psychiatric Epidemiology Research Program at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
Dr Hudson and colleagues found that binge eating disorder is more prevalent than bulimia or anorexia nervosa, and because it is directly linked with severe obesity and other damaging health problems, they describe it as a major burden to public health.
“For the first time, we have nationally representative data on eating disorders. These data clearly show that binge eating disorder is the most common eating disorder,” said Dr Hudson in a prepared statement yesterday.
The researchers extracted figures from the 2001-2003 National Comorbidity Survey Replication (NCS-R), which contains information about the mental health status of 9,282 people from across the US.
The NCS-R figures showed that 0.9 per cent of women and 0.3 per cent of men said they had had or were still suffering from anorexia nervosa, while for bulimia nervosa the figures were 1.5 percent of women and 0.5 percent of men.
Moreover, 3.5 per cent of women and 2 per cent of men had had binge eating disorder, or were still suffering from it.
Binge eating disorder is where a person has frequent episodes of uncontrolled overeating and does not purge themselves afterwards like someone with bulimia nervosa tends to do.
The researchers also calculated the average lifetime duration of the eating disorders. They found that on average anorexia lasted for 1.7 years. “Contrary to what people may believe, anorexia is not necessarily a chronic illness,” said the research team. It tends to run its course, people get better on their own. This suggests that for each severe case of anorexia there may well be a number of milder cases that are not reported or detected.
The average lifetime durations for bulimia and binge eating disorder on the other hand were found to be 8.3 and 8.1 years respectively.
The scientists also said that in contrast to anorexia and bulimia, awareness and understanding of binge eating disorder is poor, and yet it persists for a long time, and can have serious health consequences, including “obesity, diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and stroke. It is imperative that health experts take notice of these findings,” said Dr Hudson.
The scientists suggest that more research is needed to look at the differences in severity and duration of anorexia cases. If it were possible to find out what helped a person recover more quickly from an eating disorder while another person is practically crippled by it for years then this would help to prevent and treat the chronic illnesses.
Dr Hudson and his team hope that these finding will help to make a case for recognizing binge eating disorder as a psychiatric illness in its own right. For example they suggest that the illness should now be included in the next edition of the DSM manual – the bible for diagnosing mental illness – the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders which is produced by the the American Psychiatric Association.
“The Prevalence and Correlates of Eating Disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication.”
James I. Hudsona, Eva Hiripib, Harrison G. Pope, Jr. and Ronald C. Kesslerb.
Biological Psychiatry, Volume 61, Issue 3 , 1 February 2007, Pages 348-358.
doi:10.1016/j.biopsych.2006.03.040
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Written by: Catharine Paddock
Writer: Medical News Today