According to Reuters Health, a study suggests that changes in brain activity may be the root of some of the unhealthy eating patterns in people with anorexia nervosa. The team of researchers found that people have been hospitalized for anorexia initiate some areas of the brain while choosing which food to eat.
Dr. Joanna Steinglass, a psychiatrist at Columbia University Medical Center said that it is the first time to be able to directly study what is going on in the brain when someone with this disorder makes decisions about what food to eat. She added that she and her team used fMRI date which tracks and show the blood flow in the brain.
The study included 21 women who were hospitalized with anorexia and 21 healthy women. They rated 76 kinds of food that were presented according to the taste and healthiness. The team reported in Nature Neuroscience that based on the fMRI data they collected, the anorexia group activated their dorsal striatum region of the brain, which is for habitual actions compared to the other group.
The choices participants made during the study matched their choices the following day, when there was a buffet-style lunch and they were allowed to choose anything.
Steinglass told Reuters Health that the study was the first to test the theory that their eating behavior is based on deciding as a habit. They discovered that patients with this disorder make choices about food according to an eating habit which prompts a part of the brain to be activated. The healthier group doesn't have this choice pattern. The most important goal for the study is to understand how the brain function play an important role for these choices in order to create an exact treatment for this disorder, she added..
Dr. Stewart Agras of Stanford University School of Medicine said people with this kind of eating disorder have habitual eating patterns and often have different responses to rewards, perhaps responding more to long-term effects rather than short term effects compared to others. We need to know how they develop the eating patterns and how are these patterns learned. In conclusion, the fMRI results will not change anorexia treatment, he added.
