Volume 21, Issue 2
Correlation between eating disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder in adolescents
Abstract
Anorexia Nervosa can be characterized by the obsessive pursuit of thinness. Anorectic patients tend to display several of the most frequent attitudes and behaviors found in OCD patients. Patients from both categories tend to be rigid, perfectionist and prone to excessive work. Also those with bulimia nervosa have binge episodes that are compulsive in nature. Body preoccupations, caloric counting and repetitive thinking about food intake resemble OCD symptoms. Several controversial hypothesis have been advanced on the relationship between AN and OCD. One posted that AN could a variant of OCD. It can be argued, however that persistent obsessional thinking and compulsions could result from chronic malnutrition. More recently the hypothesis that AN and OCD share common neurobiological abnormalities was advanced. Being ED disorders much more frequent in females than in males, other factors than obsessive proneness, as social imitation, family influences, and others, could participate in its pathogenesis. Any comprehensive hypothesis on the OCD - ED relationships have to be able to explain gender differences, unless obsessive and compulsive traits were proved to be secondary to ED breakdown. The aim of the present study was to explore the relationships between obsessive-compulsive traits and dysfunctional attitudes to food and weight in a non-clinical sample of 632 adolescents. It was hypothesized that 1) A positive correlation between OCD and ED could be found 2)-The OCD/ED correlation had to be significantly higher in females than males. To investigate both hypotheses, correlations of scores of the Padua Inventory (Sanavio, 1988) and the Eating Attitude Test (Garner, Garfinkel, 1979) to estimate ED were studied. The results of the present study support the hypothesis that obsessive-compulsive symptoms and attitude to weight and food are correlated in non-clinical female but not male adolescents, suggesting a trait-related condition that could be thought of importance as a precondition to eating disorder development. The importance of these findings for prevention and therapy of ED are discussed.
Keywords
obsessivity; eating disorders; Pauda inventory; EAT questionnaire; adolescents.