Excessive eating at night may signal the presence of serious mental health issues, a recent study suggests.
The researchers involved in the study looked at eating disorders and the mental health history of more than 1,600 university students and found that approximately 4 percent met the night eating disorder criteria, with about a third of those also engaging in binge eating.
"Night eating syndrome is characterized not only by eating at night - certainly many college students might have a late night study fest with eating - but it's also characterized by other things, like feeling that you can't eat in the morning, and feeling like you have to eat in order to go back to sleep," said Dr. Rebecka Peebles, lead author of the study and an attending physician at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Peebles is also a researcher in the department of pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
Peebles said their study helped extend findings of past research, which failed to control for binge eating.
"We know that binge eating and night eating have a pretty moderate overlap so a lot of people who have come into the clinic for night eating often have binge eating," she said.
Their study, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, stressed the importance of distinguishing night eating from binge eating, noting that the former may require a different kind of treatment than other types of eating disorders.
The researchers also discovered that night eating was more common among students with a history of anorexia nervosa as well as those taking ADHD medications. Symptoms included increased appetite at night and waking up in the middle of the night to eat.
