Do u have uneven eating habits? Do you feel that if you face any change in emotion then your eating habits change with that particular mood, thoughts, and emotions?
Well, then you might be facing the not so common but common “Eating Disorder” which is a very serious condition affecting physical, psychological, and social function.
Various types of order contain anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder, avoidant restrictive food intake disorder, other specified feeding and eating disorders, pica, and rumination disorders.
Taken together, eating disorders affect up to 5% of the population, most often develop in adolescence and young adulthood, mainly lying between the age group of 12 and 25).
Several, especially anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are more common in women, but they can all occur at any age and affect any gender.
JAMA Network Open has published a cross-sectional functional brain imaging study which results in the saying that the BMI levels or amount of food intake has an impact on the Brain reward processing.
An eating disorder is caused due to an error in the prediction in the BMI machine, food intake control circuitry in the brain, and alteration of this circuitry and when linked with the behavioral traits linked to overeating or undereating, researchers noted.
“Food restriction, episodic binge eating or purging vary across the diagnostic groups, whereas body dissatisfaction and drive for thinness is typically elevated across all eating disorders, as are anxious traits and sensitivity to salient stimuli,” Guido K. W. Frank, MD, of the department of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues wrote
“Identifying how those behaviors are associated with particular biologic mechanisms could help create a better understanding of the underlying eating disorder pathophysiologic factors and development of specific treatments. To adopt a dimensional conceptualization of eating disorder-specific behaviors and neurobiological factors, we recruited individuals across the eating disorder spectrum and applied the prediction error construct from the National Institute of Mental Health Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project.”
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The experiment helped on a large sample of individuals with eating disorders and healthy controls so as to see the response of the brain during an unwanted salient sweet stimulus and make an observation about how the brain will respond to the ventral striatal-hypothalamic circuitry, which is linked with the control of food consumption and also observing if salient stimulus-response and the behaviors of eating problems are inter-connected.
This experiment was conducted at a university brain imaging facility and eating disorder treatment program where the eating disorder spectrum was matched with the healthy controls of 317 women, out of which 197 had eating disorders and 120 served as healthy controls.
The mean age of the participants was 23.8 years and the mean BMI was 20.8. Further, they handpicked some to conclude if any association existed between salient stimulus-response and eating disorder-related behavior.
The researchers learned the link between conditioned visual and unconditioned taste stimuli, the contestant’s dopamine-related expectation error was changed by conducting sucrose taste classic conditioning paradigm.
Further, hierarchical brain activation between brain regions related to food intake was done by studying dynamic effective connectivity during expected sweet taste receipt.
The outcomes and measures had prediction error brain reward response across insula and striatum; dynamic effective connectivity between the hypothalamus and ventral striatum; and demographic and behavioral variables and their associations with prediction error brain response and connectivity edge coefficients.
Prediction error response was elevated in participants with anorexia nervosa and in participants with eating disorders reacted in an opposite manner with body mass index, eating disorder inventory–3 binge eating tendency, and trait anxiety. Ventral striatal to hypothalamus-directed connectivity was positively correlated with ventral striatal prediction error in eating disorders and negatively associated with feeling out of control after eating.
“Temperamental traits are biologically oriented behaviors that affect eating disorder behaviors,” Frank and colleagues wrote.
“Treatment modules that specifically target those behaviors may be a key element to promote behavior change and lasting recovery.”
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Psychiatric disorders most common mood and anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and alcohol and drug abuse problems are usually the cause of eating disorders.
Heredity and genes are also a reason for eating disorders and that is experimentally proven, but families which don’t have any relation with this disorder can also be affected.
Psychological, behavioral, nutritional, and other medical complications are some things that cause the ease of eating disorders. If not dealt with care can cause malnutrition or purging behaviors including, heart and gastrointestinal problems as well as other potentially fatal conditions.
Take proper medical care and meditating are some things that can be done as a solution for eating disorders. So, try seeking medical help just in case you feel you suffer from the same, resume your healthy eating habits, and recover yourself both emotionally as well as psychologically because mental well-being is really crucial as well as significant.
And most importantly don't let the outside happenings affect the inner you!