Dr. David Herzog, Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is a renowned expert on eating disorders. He is a distinguished researcher, teacher, clinician and advocate and is the recipient of many honors and awards. Dr. Herzog was the first Endowed Professor of Psychiatry in the Field of Eating Disorders at Harvard Medical School. In 1994, he founded the Harvard Eating Disorders Center, which later became the Harris Center for Education and Advocacy in Eating Disorders at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Dr. Herzog collaborated with
researchers at Drexel University in Philadelphia to investigate the role of
weight suppression in predicting recovery or relapse in bulimia nervosa. Weight suppression is defined as the
difference between a patient’s past highest weight and her weight at entry into
the study. The participants were 110 women with bulimia nervosa from Dr.
Herzog’s National Institute of Mental Health-funded Longitudinal Study. At study entry, these 110 participants were,
on average, 25 years old and had been ill for an average of 6 years. The
researchers collected data by interviewing the women at 6-12 month intervals over
8 years about their eating behaviors, mood symptoms, and general life
functioning.
Weight suppression was significantly
associated with time to first full remission, indicating that women who were
more weight-suppressed at study entry took longer to recover. These results support
previous research suggesting that high weight suppression may fuel binge eating
and make weight gain more likely. Future research is needed to explore methods
of improving treatment outcome for highly weight-suppressed individuals with
bulimia nervosa.
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