New Study Shows Eating Disorders are Disorders of Brain Circuits

At Kartini Clinic we practice in the knowledge that parents don't cause eating disorders and children don't choose to have them. For many years this belief made us rather unpopular with the psychiatric community. But recent science has vindicated this perspective and treatment approach by demonstrating clearly that eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa are highly heritable and steered by powerful brain chemistry. Care2.com reports that psychiatric or mental disorders such as eating disorders, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression and psychosis are better understood and treated as 'disorders of the brain' according to an article by Tom Insel, M.D., Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, and Philip Wang, M.D., Deputy Director of NIMH.

The article,  Rethinking Mental Illness, is published in the May 19th issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The authors note that, while there have been many 'insights gained from genetics and neuroscience'---such as twin studies that show high heritability for autism, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder ---such research explains only a 'fraction of the heritability' of mental disorders. The article claims that some 182 genes have been identified as linked to eating disorders, and some 100 to autism.

As Dr. O'Toole, Kartini Clinic's founder and medical director, has said for many years: eating disorders such as anorexia should be seen as disorders of the brain. For more information on the biology of eating disorders see our recent blog post on this subject.