Blog Post #2

 

Anorexia nervosa is a disease that is commonly misunderstood as someone who is very thin or excessively diets and works out. This disease is actually a very complex mental health disorder that can impact your brain and body in severe ways. In this blog post, I am going to share with you the scientific effects anorexia has on the brain.

 

Recent studies have come about showing that individuals with anorexia have a reduction in brain matter between two to four times as much as individuals with other mental illnesses. The reductions are in critical parts of the brain, including cortical thickness, subcortical volumes, and cortical surface area (Sheehan, 2022). A loss of brain matter can result in difficulty concentrating, slower processing speed, and memory problems. What is good is that with recovery and successful treatment of this disease, you can have a positive impact on brain structure, and effects can be reversed with early treatment (Sheehan, 2022). Most people do not realize that this eating disorder can have such an extreme impact on your brain, and it is important to educate people with accurate information so that they know the true impact and seek recovery.

 

Research has also found that having anorexia can affect levels of serotonin and dopamine, which are neurotransmitters that control your mood, anxiety, and brain reward systems. There are alterations in reward-related brain areas due to binge eating and alterations in dopamine and serotonin in response to starvation and exercise (Avena & Bocarsly, 2012). Due to these imbalances with dopamine, people with anorexia have been known to feel content and calm when starving themselves and, therefore, do not have the brain functions warning them of how they are harming themselves. Also, this increased amount of serotonin found in anorexic individuals can actually cause an increase in anxiety and stress.

 

Another impact to the brain is that anorexia can cause impaired decision-making. Due to the malnutrition associated with anorexia, the prefrontal cortex becomes impaired. This causes people to have obsessive thoughts about food and body, struggle to have self-recognition of how sick they are, and have extreme fears of weight gain. In research, it was shown that people with anorexia had significantly altered decision-making, but someone who had recovered from the disease had similar scores to healthy controls (Guillaume et al., 2015). This shows that early intervention is important to return to normal levels of decision-making before you are unable to detect that you have a problem at all.

 

Overall, anorexia nervosa is a disease that needs treatment and recovery in order to have a healthy brain and body. The sooner the intervention of recovery starts, the less damage will be done, and many effects can even be reversed! I will talk about all the steps associated with recovery in one of my future blogs. Thanks for taking the time to read my blog today!

 

 

References

 

Avena, N. M., & Bocarsly, M. E. (2012). Dysregulation of brain reward systems in eating disorders: neurochemical information from animal models of binge eating, bulimia nervosa, and anorexia nervosa. Neuropharmacology, 63(1), 87–96. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropharm.2011.11.010

 

Guillaume, S., Gorwood, P., Jollant, F., Van den Eynde, F., Courtet, P., & Richard-Devantoy, S. (2015). Impaired decision-making in symptomatic anorexia and bulimia nervosa patients: a meta-analysis. Psychological medicine, 45(16), 3377–3391. https://doi.org/10.1017/S003329171500152X

 

Sheehan, S. (2022, November 19). Groundbreaking study shows substantial differences in brain structure in people with anorexia. Newsroom. https://keck.usc.edu/news/groundbreaking-study-shows-substantial-differences-in-brain-structure-in-people-with-anorexia/