ROME (ITALPRESS) – Eating disorders, DCA, are a complex set of psychiatric disorders that manifest themselves through a dysfunctional relationship with food, body and self-image. Among the major disorders are anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge-eating disorder. According to the Ministry of Health, an estimated 3 million people in Italy are affected by an eating disorder, with a 30 percent increase since the Covid-19 pandemic. The most affected age group is between 12 and 25, with a worrying increase in cases among children, adolescents and even adults. These are some of the issues discussed by Patrizia Todisco, psychiatrist, psychotherapist and president of the Italian Society for the Study of Eating Disorders (SISDCA), interviewed by Marco Klinger, for Medicina Top, a TV format of the Italpress news agency.”The data available are not of real incidence, in fact in Italy there is no registry of these pathologies, we can identify individuals who go to specialist centers,” Todisco premised. “Based on the clinical data, it seems that the pandemic has delatentized situations that were already predisposed. These are multifactorial pathologies, Covid-19 as a stressor led subjects already susceptible to these pathologies to develop them, triggered by concomitant causes such as isolation and increased susceptibility to social.” Many people mistakenly think that the most prevalent DCA is anorexia, but there is one disorder that is more predominant: “Anorexia has historically been identified as the main eating disorder, but it is not the most prevalent pathology, because the most prevalent is binge-eating disorder,” he explained. “It is a pathology that affects all age groups, characterized by binge eating, in which subjects gain weight because they do not compensate with fasting, vomiting or hyperactivity. In Italy alone, there are 3.5 million people suffering from these DCA disorders.” And on the incidence of genetics: “It’s a bit of a broad term: those who already have someone in their family who has suffered from an eating disorder or another psychiatric disorder are certainly more predisposed,” Todisco specified. “The generic component has been highlighted especially for anorexia nervosa, defined as metabolic-psychiatric. These individuals seem to be constitutionally thin because they have a very different genetic pattern than that which leads to increased fat mass.” There are several treatments that specialists can implement on patients with eating disorders: “These are complex and very serious disorders, requiring a multidisciplinary and integrated approach. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to be a good psychotherapist to approach these pathologies,” he admitted, “People need to feel understood, it’s not just going to work on the eating symptom, but on the importance these people give to weight, appearance, and food on their evaluation of themselves. You have to go beyond the top of the iceberg and see the suffering where it is. The patient has to be the protagonist along with all the clinicians.” And on how to catch the signs of a DCA: “In adolescence, a sudden diet or wanting to do a lot of physical activity. An index can also be a lack of interest in the outside world, not wanting to go out with friends, or controlling food weight in a very obsessive way…It is not easy to have the cooperation of these patients,” Todisco added. “These pathologies are functional for the individual and very often are kept hidden, they often come to us after years because they keep the disease that seems to give them an advantage. “To talk about definitive recovery in eating disorders is very slippery. Studies say that about one-third of patients recover, one-third improve, and one-third tend to have a long history of the disease,” he recalled. “It is true that we need to work not only on symptomatology, so on food and weight, but especially on psychopathology, because there are usually associated anxiety and mood disorders. “Rehabilitation has to be biopsychosocial, with the union of these three parts,” he reiterated, “And we have to distinguish between the remission of symptoms, which can also occur, for example, with falling in love or the birth of a child, and the resolution of psychopathology, for which long therapies are needed. Finally, on the alarm bells for recognizing eating disorders and avoiding their onset: “First, don’t stress the focus on food and weight in families, you need to try to eat together and notice how your children eat. And again, be very careful when a teenager asks to lose weight, do not mock him if he weighs a lot and is perhaps clumsy,” he concluded. “Attention to healthy eating yes, but not rigidity and extremism.
– photo taken from Top Medicine video -(ITALPRESS).
