Browsing by Subject "anoreksia"

Anorexia nervosa and other eating disorders are linked with certain personality and behavior traits: for example, people with eating disorders are more perfectionistic and neurotic as well as less extroverted than healthy people. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether traits associated with anorexia nervosa persist after clinical recovery. This paper covers ten studies in which people recovered from eating disorders are compared to people unaffected with eating disorders. It seems that there is great variety in the stability of different traits after the recovery from the eating disorder. Perfectionism might be stable feature even after the recovery.

Depression is one of the most common comorbid mental disorders in anorexia. Many of those who have anorexia have also depression at some point in their lives . Vice versa the connection isn’t as clear, but it has been found that eating disorders are more common among people with depression than others. In this thesis the order of onset and possible causal relationships are examined. Possible hypotheses of causality between depression and anorexia are also examined According to studies depression can precede anorexia, it can begin at same time with anorexia or it can begin after anorexia onset. So it can’t be said that always other disorder expose to another. However according to studies onsets are usually close to each other. There are number of possible hypotheses about the relationship between anorexia and depression. In this thesis hypotheses that malnutrition affects to mood and genetic predisposition are taken for further evaluation. It is possible that part of the depression diagnoses is incorrect and depressive symptoms are caused by malnutrition that changes serotonin activation in brain. The results of the effects of malnutrition to mood are partially unclear. In some studies weight recovery was associated with mood improvement and in some studies this association was not found. However there were few problems with the studies. For example treatment included also therapy and other treatments so it is difficult to distinguish what is the effect of the weight restoration. When genetic predisposition was examined, common genetic factors between anorexia and depression were found. Relatives of the anorexia patients also have elevated risk to depression compared to relatives of the healthy controls. Results suggest that there is association between depression and anorexia but the causality remains unclear. Association can be explained many ways and it is important to get more information about the possible causality between depression and anorexia. It is important for better treatment and prevention. Especially more longitudinal studies are needed. Also more studies about malnutrition impacts to mood are needed so it is possible to avoid for example unnecessary medications.