By Robert Preidt
HealthDay reporter
THURSDAY, April 15, 2021 (HealthDay News) – Stress doesn’t cause binge eating in people with eating disorders, new research shows.
The results challenge a common theory that, according to the study’s authors, has never been tested directly in patients.
Her research included 85 women (22 with anorexia, 33 with bulimia, and a control group of 30 without an eating disorder). Study participants were examined for two days to see how stress affected their eating habits.
The women also had MRI brain scans to assess brain activity.
“The idea was to see what happened when these women were stressed. Has it affected key areas of the brain that are important for self-control, and has this in turn increased food intake? What we found got us surprised and contradicts it. ” prevailing theory, “said Margaret Westwater, who led the study as a PhD student in the psychiatric department of Cambridge University in the UK.
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At a buffet, the women with eating disorders ate less overall than the women in the control group, but the amount they ate did not differ between stress-inducing and non-stressful tests, the results showed.
The researchers found that activity in two major brain regions was related to the amount of calories consumed in all three groups, suggesting that these regions play important roles in controlling eating.
“Although these two eating disorders are similar in many ways, there are marked differences at the brain level,” Westwater said in a university press release.
Women with bulimia in particular seem to have problems slowing their response to changes in the environment. That could lead to hasty decisions that make her prone to binge eating, she added.
“The theory is that these women should have eaten more when they were stressed, but we really didn’t find that,” Westwater said. “When we think about the eating behavior in these disorders, we must of course be more differentiated.”
The results were published in the Journal of Neuroscience on April 12th.
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Co-senior author Paul Fletcher said the results make it clear that the relationship between stress and binge eating is very complicated.
“It’s about the environment around us, our mental state and how our body signals to us that we are hungry or full,” said Fletcher, professor of psychiatry.
If researchers can better understand how the gut shapes thoughts related to self-control or decision-making, they may be better able to help people with “these extremely debilitating diseases,” he said.
“To do that, we need to take a much more integrated approach to studying these diseases,” added Fletcher.
More information
The US National Institute of Mental Health is more concerned with eating disorders.
SOURCE: Cambridge University, press release, April 12, 2021
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