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Recent Advances in Neuroimaging to Model Eating Disorder Neurobiology

  • Eating Disorders (C Grilo, Section Editor)
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Abstract

The eating disorders (EDs) anorexia nervosa (AN), bulimia nervosa (BN), and binge eating disorder (BED) are severe psychiatric disorders with high mortality. There are many symptoms, such as food restriction, episodic binge eating, purging, or excessive exercise that are either overlapping or lie on opposite ends of a scale or spectrum across those disorders. Identifying how specific ED behaviors are linked to particular neurobiological mechanisms could help better categorize ED subgroups and develop specific treatments. This review provides support from recent brain imaging research that brain structure and function measures can be linked to disorder-specific biological or behavioral variables, which may help distinguish ED subgroups, or find commonalities between them. Brain structure and function may therefore be suitable research targets to further study the relationship between dimensions of behavior and brain function relevant to EDs and beyond the categorical AN, BN, and BED distinctions.

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Acknowledgments

All procedures performed in studies from our group involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the studies from our group reported on. Funding for this work was provided by NIMH grants R01MH096777 and R01MH103436.

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Conflict of Interest

Guido K.W. Frank declares that he has no conflict of interest.

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This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

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  1. Departments of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Children’s Hospital Colorado, Gary Pavilion A036/B-130, 13123 East 16th Avenue, Aurora, CO, 80045, USA

    Guido K. W. Frank

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Correspondence to Guido K. W. Frank.

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Frank, G.K.W. Recent Advances in Neuroimaging to Model Eating Disorder Neurobiology. Curr Psychiatry Rep 17, 22 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11920-015-0559-z

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