Eating Disorder Talk

Yes, I know that title came across as genuinely arrogant, and trust me, I only half-meant it. Back in 1999, I started college as a mature student (ha) because I had dropped out of high school and was without the diploma that might guarantee my intake. I got in and spent the next five semesters with too heavy a course-load, reading text books the day of the test and writing 10 page psychology papers.

I took the lower-level classes required so that I could get into the really interesting stuff: adolescent and abnormal psych. adolescent was my niche, with my given history of ultra-extreme, uber-problematic teen years. there was sexual assault, drugs, drinking, smoking, self-image and eating disorders all wrapped up in a broken package in me, and I thrived on learning the scientific reasoning, having been a precocious reader from the tender age of seven and being well acquainted with the social ones. Add to it my penchant for planning far into the future, my future (down to what classes I would take so as to be granted a double-honours degree and therefore a potentially superior master’s program application), and I started to think about what I would do my master’s thesis and doctorate papers on. My masters was to be the direct effect of various pictures on women’s body-images; the doctorate, a study of various neural models of women with, without and recovered from eating disorders.

my theory was that since the hypothalamus was an area identified to be associated with pleasure, satiety and appetite, those with anorexia might show a different firing pattern or even a reduced hypothalamic size. Those with over-eating and binging tendencies might show increased activity in these areas; those fasting would show decreased activity.

Lo and behold, it’s eight years later, and scientists have released the results of a study that showed anorexics as having increased activity in the regions associated with anxiety and perfectionism using the results of a functional MRI.

Interesting is that anorexics showed little difference in brain activity between a win or loss in the game they played during observation - something indicative of an apathy towards pleasure and distress. Another brain area was shown to be more active in the anorexic group, the caudate. This area is linked to planning and linking actions to outcome. This intrigues as the anorexic group showed a heightened concern for the effect of their actions and for hidden rules - to the classification of obsessive.

This could mean so much for the treatment of eating disorders - in the very least, for the diagnosis of them (unless you choose to self-diagnose, via Internet tests). Imagine if you could use a similar test to find a predisposition? It also means that I’ll need a more original theory for my doctorate, should I ever get there.