TUESDAY, June 3 (HealthDay News) -- Boys and girls develop
eating disorders for different reasons, so prevention strategies
may need to vary by gender, according to a new report.
"Frequent dieting and trying to look like persons in the media
were independent predictors of binge eating in females of all ages.
In males, negative comments about weight by fathers was predictive
of starting to binge at least weekly," wrote the authors, whose
findings were published in the June issue of
Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.
Prevention strategies, they said, should address those specific
causes. For example, campaigns aimed at females should focus on
media literacy and decreasing their susceptibility to media images;
for males, efforts should focus on how to be more resilient to
negative comments about weight.
In analyzing seven years of data on more than 12,500 children,
the researchers found 10.3 percent of the girls and 3 percent of
the boys started to binge eat or purge (vomit or use laxatives to
control weight) at least once a week. Purging (5.3 percent) was
slightly more common than binge eating (4.3 percent) in girls,
while boys were almost three times as likely to binge eat than
purge (2.1 percent versus 0.8 percent). Only a small proportion of
boys and girls had both disorders.
The children were between age 9 and 15 at the start of the study
in 1996.
While girls under age 14 whose mothers had a history eating
disorders were almost three times as likely than other children to
start purging at least once a week, "maternal history of an eating
disorder was unrelated to risk of starting to binge eat or purge in
older adolescent females," wrote the authors, who were led by
Alison E. Field, of the Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard
Medical School.
More information
The U.S. National Institute of Mental Health has more about
eating disorders.
