Eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and bulimia nervosa affect millions of people around the world, but their underlying causes are complex and not fully understood. not.Recent research published in neuropsychopharmacology revealed a relationship between food expectations, anxiety traits, and the brain’s response to eating disorders. This research may have important implications for treating eating disorders and developing more effective treatments.
Eating disorders are mental illnesses characterized by abnormal eating behaviors and body dissatisfaction. Anorexia nervosa involves severe dietary restriction and low body weight, bulimia nervosa involves periodic binge eating and purging, and bulimia nervosa is characterized by recurrent episodes of binge eating without compensatory behavior. There is also a category known as Other Specified Eating Disorders (OSFED), which includes disorders that do not meet the criteria for the specific categories listed above.
People with eating disorders often share high levels of body dissatisfaction and a desire to be thin, and also have difficulty managing strong emotional states such as anxiety, sadness, and anger.
Previous research suggests that anxiety-related traits, such as trait anxiety and harm avoidance, may be risk factors for developing eating disorders. Trait anxiety refers to the tendency for anxiety levels to increase in a variety of situations, whereas harm avoidance involves increased awareness of environmental threats. Previous research has associated these traits with different aspects of eating disorder psychopathology.
Neurobiological studies have also shown that the brain’s reward circuitry plays an important role in the development and maintenance of eating disorders. These circuits are involved in processing pleasurable experiences, including food consumption. Previous research has shown that people with eating disorders exhibit changes in these reward circuits.
“Our study of the brain’s so-called reward circuitry showed that people with eating disorders respond differently in dopamine-related brain circuits compared to controls,” said study author and researcher at the University of California, San Diego. said Guido K. W. Frank, professor of psychiatry at the school. Director of Psychiatry at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego.
“Also, the cognitive-emotional aspects of eating disorders, the fear of gaining weight again or eating, and body image issues are very similar across all eating disorders, with a conditioned fear of high-calorie foods. We also know that this is broadening the range of diagnoses. However, we are not aware of 1) what brain circuits are involved in the anticipation and fear of receiving caloric food, and 2) the relationship between expectations and consequences (actually). It is unclear how 3) receiving caloric stimuli interact with each other, and 3) whether anxiety not related to eating disorders influences them.”
“The latter in particular was an important question for me because it struck me how often eating disorders enter people’s lives when faced with stress (such as school).” At that time, several patients had a recurrence every August, and this was the time when school started, which was very stressful for people who were already perfectionists and prone to anxiety.”
The study involved 197 women with various types of eating disorders and 120 healthy control participants. To ensure data accuracy, participants underwent a battery of assessments, including psychiatric diagnoses, anxiety assessments, and measures of eating disorder behaviors and attitudes.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to measure brain activity while participants anticipated and received caloric and non-caloric taste stimuli. The researchers focused on specific areas of the brain, including the amygdala, which plays a central role in processing expectations, vigilance, anxiety, and threat, and areas associated with reward processing.
Frank et al. found that people with eating disorders showed elevated amygdala responses when anticipating high-calorie food stimuli compared to healthy controls. This heightened response in the amygdala suggests an increased sensitivity to predicting caloric intake in people with eating disorders.
“In other words, expectations about how food and meals will turn out are a big factor in how people react when they actually receive and eat that food,” Frank told SciPost. “This is important because psychotherapy and other treatments can be used to modify expectations. Additionally, trait anxiety and anxious temperament can influence all of those processes, so how do we influence them?” We also need to pay attention to how we manage it.”
Trait anxiety significantly influenced the relationship between amygdala responses to expectancy and brain responses to sucrose acceptance. There is an inverted U-shaped relationship, indicating that both low and very high trait anxiety levels are associated with decreased amygdala reactivity.
“There is an inverted U-shaped relationship between trait anxiety and brain responses, such that amygdala responses are not only low for low trait anxiety (which probably has low activation to begin with), but also for very high levels of trait anxiety. (People were probably showing a certain level of “burnout” after a long period of intense anxiety). This shows that research may not find connections between brain and behavior because we tend to look for linear relationships, but those relationships don’t always exist,” said Frank. he explained.
This study suggests that modifying expectations about what eating will be like may be a promising goal for treatment of people with eating disorders. Furthermore, managing anxious traits may play an important role in improving the brain’s response to food-related stimuli.
Although this study provides valuable insights, it also has limitations. This study primarily focused on women, and future research should investigate how these findings apply to individuals of different genders. Additionally, the results of this study are correlational and further research is needed to establish causality and determine the most effective interventions for people with eating disorders.
“We need to find the most effective ways to treat behavioral abnormalities in the brain to alleviate suffering,” Frank said.
the study, “Trait anxiety is associated with amygdala expectancy and caloric taste reception responses across eating disorders” was written by Guido K. W. Frank, Megan E. Schott, Tamara Pryor, Skylar Swindle, Tyler Nguyen, and Joel Stoddard.
