Update: Longitudinal Study

The 19th Annual Meeting of the Eating Disorders Research Society took place on September 19-21, 2013 in Bethesda, Maryland.  Among the winners of the top-five abstract awards was "How Do We Define 'Recovery' from Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia Nervosa at 25 Years?" This is the first paper out of the 25-year follow-up to Dr. David Herzog's NIMH-funded Longitudinal Study of Anorexia and Bulimia Nervosa.

Weight Suppression and Bulimia Nervosa

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.