More and more adolescents suffer from anorexia

More and more adolescents suffer from anorexia. Already every fifth adolescent suffers from eating disorders

12/01/2011

More and more adolescents suffer from eating disorders to anorexia. According to the director of the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Münster, Prof. Dr. med. Tilman Fürniss, and the senior physician Annabel Köchling suspected an eating disorder.

The doctors of the University of Münster have introduced a new therapeutic approach to counteract the growing problem of eating disorders among adolescents. Again and again, adolescents with extreme deficiency symptoms and anorexia are admitted to the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Prof. Dr. Tilman Fürniss reports on an 18-year-old patient who weighed 29 kilograms when admitted to the clinic. „An extreme case“ of anorexia, as the clinic director admitted. But there is a general tendency among teenagers to suffer from morbid eating disorders. Fürniss: „The number and severity of eating disorders has been increasing for some time.“

Eating Disorders are becoming more prevalent among adolescents
At the same time, the average age of patients with eating disorders had clearly shifted, explained the expert. While only a few decades ago predominantly adolescent patients between the ages of 14 and 16 were affected, today some nine-year-olds already suffer from eating disorders, emphasized the clinic director. Overall, every fifth adolescent between the ages of eleven and 17 is suspected of having a morbid eating disorder, according to Prof. Fürniss. In the course of puberty between 14 and 17 years, even every third girl and every seventh boy affected, „also boys“ increasingly suffer from eating disorders. Because they are often not so strong in their personality and „they emulate the social slimming ideal“, that live by stars and starlets daily, many young people develop a strong urge to lose weight. This often ends in a corresponding disorder of eating behavior that can easily lead to anorexia, said the expert.

Anorexia: A life-threatening addiction
According to the clinic director, anorexia is by no means to be underestimated or dismissed as a temporary fad, „It is an addictive disease that can be fatal.“ Because young people who are getting thinner, not only lose body weight, but the brain breaks down substance, explained the expert. „It shrinks by 20 to 30 percent and is completely in some areas the function“, so Dr. Fürniss. In addition, effects on the cardiovascular system and growth are possible. A cardiac arrest or growth stop are not uncommon, explained the expert. For example, the 18-year-old patient, who only weighed 29 kilograms when she was admitted, was only 1.46 meters tall, emphasized the clinic director. According to the expert, those affected often go to great lengths to ensure their massive underweight members and friends do not notice, they conceal where it is possible. Thick sweaters or even lead weights in the shoes - „Their ingenuity knows no bounds“, stressed Fürniss. „For many parents, it's shocking to see their daughter or son in a vest for the first time in our clinic“, the expert continues. For the parents are often not recognized as anorexia nervosa and instead of education problems or the like, until they are confronted with the painful truth, explained the doctors of the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

New therapy approach against eating disorders
In the University of Münster, therefore, a novel therapeutic approach to combat eating disorders was introduced, with which the clinic, in the opinion of the director Dr. med. Fürniss does pioneer work in the fight against anorexia. Six to seven sufferers come together with the families on 25 days a year in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry to learn together how they can deal with the disease. The family is more involved, in Dr. This is a significant advance in therapy. Because „Eating disorders are not only in extreme cases, life-threatening diseases, they also affect and burden any family life“, explained the expert. So it is also a goal of the new therapy, often „to solve highly destructive family conflicts at an early stage in terms of specialist therapy“, stressed Fürniss. (Fp)

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Image: Claudia Hautumm