Large study reveals stark changes in brain structure for people with anorexia

A major study, coordinated by neuroscientists at the University of Bath (UK) with international partners, has revealed key differences in brain structure between people with and without anorexia nervosa.

Anorexia — which is a severe eating disorder and mental health condition — affects over a quarter of a million people aged 16 and over in the UK. Symptoms are characterised by people trying to keep their weight as low as possible by not eating enough.

Understanding why some people develop anorexia whilst others do not is still largely unknown, although biological factors are widely recognised. These new findings, which draw on extensive analyses of brain scans taken from patients around the world and are published in the journal Biological Psychiatry, go some way to answering the question.

They reveal that people with anorexia demonstrate ‘sizeable reductions’ in three critical measures of the brain: cortical thickness, subcortical volumes and cortical surface area. Reductions in brain size are significant because they are thought to imply the loss of brain cells or the connections between them.

The results are some of the clearest yet to show links between structural changes in the brain and eating disorders. The team says that the effect sizes in their study for anorexia are in fact the largest of any psychiatric disorder investigated to date.

This means that people with anorexia showed reductions in brain size and shape between two and four times larger than people with conditions such as depression, ADHD, or OCD. The changes observed in brain size for anorexia might be attributed to reductions in people’s body mass index (BMI).

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