A study from King’s College London Institute of Psychiatry shows that the brains of women with bulimia respond to images of slim women differently than women without bulimia. When pictures of the food were shown to both groups of women, they responded similarly.

Published in BMC Psychiatry, this study suggests that treatments for bulimia should focus more on the issues of self-image than the issues of food.

In order to increase knowledge with the neurological process behind bulimia that brings about binge-eating food and purging, the researchers investigated the brain patterns in a group of 21 women with bulimia and 23 women without. They discovered that brain processes between the two groups differed only when pictures of slim women were presented.

Each of the participants were in functional magnetic imagining resonance (fMRI) scans to investigate where brain activity occurred when the participants were presented with images. Before being presented with images, the participants were given instructions like “imagine eating this food” or “compare your own body against the bodies in the pictures”. Four images were presented to the participant at a given moment:

• Appealing food
• Slim women
• Control images
• Black cross (for baseline signal)

When comparing brain scans, it was apparent that the areas of the brain concerned with self-reflection were activated more in women with bulimia when shown images of slim women than it was with healthy women.  Conversely, when women with bulimia were shown images of food, there were no significant differences between both groups. Both images of thin women and food pictures did result in an increase of subjective anxiety in women with bulimia.

Frederique Van den Eynde, currently at McGill University and the Douglas Mental Health Institute in Montreal, lead author of the study, says "This supports the idea that psychotherapy for bulimia nervosa should have a particular focus on body image and not solely focus on food and eating-related issues."

The researchers hope their results could be used to develop further other clinical treatments that may offset the brain activation patterns found.

Additional Resource:

Brain responses to body image stimuli, but not food are altered in women with bulimia nervosa