Previous studies have shown that the brains of people with anorexia behave differently than in non-disordered people — read here. Now a new study suggests that bulimia, in part, may also be triggered by changes in the brain.
Researchers at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute studied the performances of 20 healthy women and 20 women with bulimia (median duration of 9 years) in taking the Simon Spatial Incompatibility task, in which a subject indicates the direction of an arrow regardless of its location on a screen. Participants performed the task while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. Patients with bulimia responded more impulsively and made more errors than did the healthy controls; those with the most severe symptoms made the most errors.
The science behind it is a little heady for this liberal arts major, but basically the report found that the frontostriatal circuits did not activate to the same degree in women with bulimia as in the control group (frontostriatal circuits are nerve pathways that aid on the control of voluntary behavior). These group differences lead researchers to believe that people with bulimia do not activate frontostriatal circuits appropriately, perhaps contributing to impulsive responses to conflict stimuli that normally require this region of the brain and self-regulatory control. This inability to “engage frontrostriatal systems also contributes to their inability to regulate binge-type eating and other impulsive behaviors,” concluded the authors.
At this point, it’s not clear if the brain differences are a cause or an effect of the disorder. The authors plan to expand on this hypothesis by conducting future studies on impulsive people of healthy weight and eating behaviors, adolescents close to the time when bulimia most often develops and patients with varying severity of symptoms. But the research does seem to offer promising explanations on why people with bulimia also tend to be more at risk for abuse of drugs and alcohol and other addictions, like shopping or self-harming, and/or engage in practices like unsafe and impulsive sexual behavior or reckless driving.
The report was released in this month’s Archives of General Psychiatry — abstract here. MSN has a good synopsis of the study here.
Cross-posted on www.the-f-word.org
Previous studies have shown that the brains of people with anorexia behave differently than in non-disordered people — read here. Now a new study suggests that bulimia, in part, may also be triggered by changes in the brain.
Researchers at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute studied the performances of 20 healthy women and 20 women with bulimia (median duration of 9 years) in taking the Simon Spatial Incompatibility task, in which a subject indicates the direction of an arrow regardless of its location on a screen. Participants performed the task while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. Patients with bulimia responded more impulsively and made more errors than did the healthy controls; those with the most severe symptoms made the most errors.
The science behind it is a little heady for this liberal arts major, but basically the report found that the frontostriatal circuits did not activate to the same degree in women with bulimia as in the control group (frontostriatal circuits are nerve pathways that aid on the control of voluntary behavior). These group differences lead researchers to believe that people with bulimia do not activate frontostriatal circuits appropriately, perhaps contributing to impulsive responses to conflict stimuli that normally require this region of the brain and self-regulatory control. This inability to “engage frontrostriatal systems also contributes to their inability to regulate binge-type eating and other impulsive behaviors,” concluded the authors.
At this point, it’s not clear if the brain differences are a cause or an effect of the disorder. The authors plan to expand on this hypothesis by conducting future studies on impulsive people of healthy weight and eating behaviors, adolescents close to the time when bulimia most often develops and patients with varying severity of symptoms. But the research does seem to offer promising explanations on why people with bulimia also tend to be more at risk for abuse of drugs and alcohol and other addictions, like shopping or self-harming, and/or engage in practices like unsafe and impulsive sexual behavior or reckless driving.
The report was released in this month’s Archives of General Psychiatry — abstract here. MSN has a good synopsis of the study here.
Cross-posted on www.the-f-word.org