Prevalence and predictors of early onset eating disorders: A longitudinal investigation of the adolescent brain and cognitive development study

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to address gaps in the eating disorder literature across three related studies. The planned studies will utilize data from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development study, a large, multi-site, ten-year longitudinal study of 9–10-year-old children. This study is the largest long-term study of brain development and child health in the United States, and it includes data from clinical interviews, behavioral and neurocognitive tasks, and biospecimens of roughly 12,000 children. The first study plans to examine prevalence of early onset eating disorders over three timepoints, and demographic characteristics of the sample with eating disorders. The second and third studies aim to assess temporal risk factors of eating disorders; particularly, comorbid mental disorders and high risk behaviors. Past literature indicates high rates of psychiatric comorbidity among individuals with eating disorders, particularly mood, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorders. While some literature indicates anxiety disorders and obsessive-compulsive disorder onset typically precedes the onset of eating disorders, associations between comorbid disorders and specific eating disorder subtypes remain unclear, and they have yet to be studied longitudinally prior to adolescence. Paper three is a longitudinal examination of the experiential avoidance model. Specifically, self-harm and suicidality are associated with a variety of disordered eating behaviors and may serve some of the same underlying functions. Previous longitudinal studies are relatively limited, and this is the first to examine these behaviors temporally among children. Taken together, these three studies aim to address the present lack of clarity in the literature on distinctive risk factors of various eating disorders among a large and diverse sample of children. Further, the present studies seek to clarify the nature of eating disorder psychopathology in youth, to improve the identification of individuals at risk for eating disorders, and to inform the development of improved prevention and treatment efforts.