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Page: << Prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | Next >> "These were adult women who had had the illness for a median of nine years," Marsh said. "We don't know if [the changes are] the product of having the disorder for nine years, or if something determines development of the disorder."
The study was expected to be published in the January issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry.
Bulimia nervosa, characterized by alternating binging and purging episodes (vomiting and taking laxatives being among the more common behaviors), primarily affects girls and women.
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Researchers are just beginning to untangle the neurochemistry of eating disorders.
"Patients with bulimia nervosa are very impulsive, not only in an inability to stop eating everything in front of them, but there is also a high prevalence of shoplifting and drug abuse in this population," Marsh said. Mood disorders are also common in these women, indicating that problems with behavioral self-regulation might be at play.
The researchers compared results from fMRI on 20 women (average age about 26) with bulimia nervosa and 20 age-matched controls.
Participants were shown pictures with arrows pointing either left or right and were asked to identify which way the arrows were pointing. In the simple version of the task, the arrows pointing left were on the left side of the screen and the right-directed arrows on the right side of the screen.
For the more difficult component of the task, the leftward-pointing arrow was positioned on the right side of the screen.
"When individuals are performing correctly, they need to engage self-regulatory control or cognitive control. They need to hold back the automatic response strategy in order to perform correctly," Marsh explained.
Women with bulimia nervosa performed faster on the difficult trials and made more errors and, when they were performing the task, they did not engage the same brain circuitry as the controls.
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