Anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder in which a person slowly starves herself because she mistakenly believes that she is overweight. One percent of girls and one tenth of one percent of boys have the disorder.
Dr. Elisabet Wentz, a professor at Sahlgrenska Academy, and her colleagues studied 51 teenagers with anorexia nervosa beginning in 1985.
By 2003, six percent of the girls were still anorexic and 39 percent had at least one other psychiatric problem, most often obsessive-compulsive disorder. Though anorexia has a high death rate, all 51 participants were still alive almost 20 years later.
This study appears in the International Journal of Eating Disorders.
Posted By: Aspen Education Group