Eating disorders like bulimia nervosa, anorexia nervosa, and binge eating are the most common eating disorders among younger people.
These disorders often come along with depression, substance abuse or anxiety disorders. An eating disorder often reflects a child's unrevealed emotions like experiencing emotional, social or developmental difficulties and can have a negative impact on their normal growth and development. According to the experts, children as young as five can be affected by the disorder.
It's up to parents to be able to identify the symptoms of the disorder in their children early to avoid the consequences.
To help parents, researchers from University of Bristol identified some features that can predict a child's risks of developing the disorder later- higher IQ, better working memory and poor attention control.
Dr. Nadia Micali and colleagues included 6,200 children, aged eight part of the Children of the 90s study (ALSPAC) to examine the risks factors of eating disorder. All the participants had a family member suffering from either anorexia, bulimia or both. The intelligence and cognitive function of the participants were tested and recorded.
Proving the researcher's theory, nearly 3.7 percent of the children with a family history of the disorder displayed some common characteristics like better working memory, higher IQ and low attention control and were placed under the risk category of developing the disorder.
"Cognitive differences have been observed in patients with eating disorders, but by looking at children at an early age when they had not yet developed an eating disorder, we could rule out the confounding effects of poor diet on the brain," Radha Kothari, author of the study, said in a news release. "This meant we could focus on characteristics that might increase the risk of developing an eating disorder, rather than characteristics which might be the result of an eating disorder.
"For example, being less able to inhibit the brain's automatic response in the tests given here might later translate into an inability to inhibit thoughts about weight and shape. Or struggling with visuo-spatial perception might later lead to the perceived distortion of body shape that is commonly experienced by people with eating disorders."
The study is published in the journal Psychological Medicine.
