Anorexia is an eating disorder that causes people to obsess over their body image and an extreme fear of being overweight. It is characterized by a person having difficulty maintaining an appropriate weight for their age and height and the means people will go to lose/avoid gaining weight can often lead to severe complications like osteoporosis, heart attacks, and even death. There are several ways anorexia nervosa may manifest differently for individuals. These can include: severely limiting how many calories or what foods one eats in a day, starving themselves, or using compensatory behaviors if they do eat like exercising excessively, using laxatives, or throwing up on purpose.
Research from 2005 has shown that patients who suffer from anorexia have a persistent disturbance of serotonin neuronal systems that may be related to increased anxiety. Researcher Dr. Walter Kaye has dedicated a lot of his time to researching anorexia and in 2020 he and his fellow researchers utilized functional MRI to examine patients in remission compared to control patients without an eating disorder. All the women subjects received a sucrose solution or ionic water while fMRI data was acquired. The researchers compared blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signals and task-based functional connectivity and found that the BOLD signals were similar across the two groups. They also found that “a group-by-group condition interaction in the ventral caudal putamen indicated that hunger had opposite effects on tastant response in the control group and the remitted anorexia nervosa group, with an increase and a decrease, respectively, in BOLD response when hungry” (Kaye et al.). In this research across groups using a fMRI would be an effective strategy. But what about at the individual level?
In research conducted by Dr. Caterina Gratton and her colleagues, results show that using fMRI at the individual level in clinical settings is not particularly useful. Gratton et al. looked at the functional brain networks by using fMRI and related that to the current understanding of psychiatric disorders. They suggest that while fMRI can be helpful in identifying broader brain systems and giving context of brain activity during certain tasks, fMRI is not as helpful at the individual level of identifying the role of specific neuroanatomy when it comes to psychiatric disorders. However, there is a more reliable and more sensitive type of fMRI called precision fMRI (pfMRI) that can be utilized to look at more specific areas and target them for treatment.
Gratton et al. found that pfMRI has established early convergent evidence showing a relationship in individual differences and behavioral variation that shows up in the form of network variants. This could be a very important tool for assessing eating disorders in the brain, especially since they can present themselves in different behaviors across patients and even vary in the same anorexic patient as multiple behaviors. Research has shown that individualized treatment for anorexia is important and essential for recovery (Métraux). More research needs to be conducted but the use of pfMRI to investigate eating disorders could be promising. By using pfMRI doctors and psychiatrists would be able to make a more personalized treatment plan for their patients suffering from anorexia nervosa and other eating disorders instead of trying generalized techniques.
References
Gratton, C., Kraus, B. T., Greene, D. J., Gordon, E. M., Laumann, T. O., Nelson, S. M., Dosenbach, N., & Petersen, S. E. (2020). Defining Individual-Specific Functional Neuroanatomy for Precision Psychiatry. Biology psychiatry, 88(1), 28-39. www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006322319318293
Kaye, Walter H., et al. “Neural Insensitivity to the Effects of Hunger in Women Remitted From Anorexia Nervosa.” American Journal of Psychiatry, 12 Mar. 2020, ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2019.19030261
Métraux, Julia. “Research Highlights the Need for Individualized Anorexia Treatment.” Verywell Health, 26 Feb. 2021, www.verywellhealth.com/anorexia-treatment-individualized-5114175
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