The treatment of eating disorders is partly medical, partly nutritional,
and partly psychological -- just like the diseases themselves. It's rare
for a single person to be expert in all three of these areas, and therapy
often must include the patient's family as well as the patient as an
individual, so an eating-disorder patient must be treated by a team that
includes a doctor, a dietitian, and at least one therapist. The treatment
of
anorexia nervosa,
bulimia nervosa, and the similar but less well-defined eating
disorders share many common features, and so I talk about them in a
single page, but there are also treatment features unique to the
different disorders.
Nutritional Treatment
Recovery from eating disorders cannot happen without restoring proper nutrition. The patient wants to "eat healthy", and we want her to "eat healthy", too; the problem is teaching her what "eating healthy" really means. This is a job for a dietitian, who can help her learn to choose a well-balanced diet that provides enough nutrition to meet her baseline needs (few people realize that an adult merely laying in bed doing nothing still burns about 1200 calories each day), energy for her activity and exercise, and nutrition for restoring lost organ and muscle tissue (we refer to the last as repletion).
However, really poor nutrition can interfere with the rest of the recovery process. This is because your brain needs a certain level of nutrition to function properly. One example I use when speaking with a patient's parents: the brain needs protein, carbohydrates, and -- yes -- some fatty nutrients just to lay down memory patterns. I have (too) often seen severely malnourished patients hospitalized for several weeks who, when they are sent home, do not remember very much of their first week in the hospital. It's hard to learn anything if your memory doesn't work.
For this and other reasons, most of us who manage eating disorder (especially anorexic) patients in the hospital are rather aggressive about refeeding: although we start refeeding at relatively low levels to avoid the refeeding syndrome, we also increase a patient's nutritional intake as quickly as is safe for her. There are two ways to do this: one is to feed her by a tube (through the nose or mouth, into the stomach) or with IV nutritional solutions (total parenteral nutrition, or TPN), and the other is to give her actual food. Because of the learning issues and problems with psychotherapy in severely malnourished patients, some doctors will feed a severely anorexic patient by tube or TPN, with little or no "real food", until her weight and metabolism improve, and then switch her to real food at or just before discharging her from the hospital. This may allow safer and more rapid refeeding, and bring her nutritional state to a point where she can benefit from therapy, but it also means that she may suddenly have to change from a large amount of tube or IV nutrition to an equivalent amount of food in a few days or less, just before she goes home. This may be very hard to do for a patient who is in the hospital largely because she's afraid of food, and who is so badly malnourished that she needs large amounts of food even for slow repletion, let alone base and energy requirements.
To avoid the abrupt and possibly scary transition from no apparent food to a large diet, some doctors -- including myself -- take a different approach. We start giving a patient food when we admit her, beginning at a low level (1000 calories/day or so -- which may be much more then she's used to, but is still a safe place to start). We then increase every day by a small amount, and stop when she is gaining a certain amount of weight every day. We do not use TPN unless she is extremely malnourished, we do not use liquid supplements such as Boost or Ensure routinely, and we do not feed her by tube unless she cannot finish a meal. We give her 3 meals and 1-3 snacks each day (they start out very small but increase gradually) and set a time limit for each meal and snack. If she cannot finish a meal we take the leftover food away and give her supplement to drink to make up for the food she could not finish. If she cannot drink the supplement, then and only then we will give her the supplement through a temporary feeding tube.
Note that we do all these "extra" measures when she cannot eat her food, not when she will not eat her food. This is an important point: we feel that an anorexic cannot eat a healthy diet because of her disease process, and is not deliberately avoiding food -- which means that we are helping her to overcome the effects of her disease rather than punishing her for actions that are really beyond her control.
Initially, of course, an anorexic patient will not be able to make healthy food choices on her own. This is also part of the dietitian's role: at the beginning of a hospital stay, the dietitian has to plan the patient's menus. However, since one of our immediate goals is to teach her to choose her own meals, her dietitian will almost immediately start having her pick her menus. Early on, the menu she picks may not provide her with enough nutrition for her basic needs, let alone activity and repletion, so her dietitian may have to add food items. As she progresses through her treatment, though, she should become better at choosing and eating food, and as she nears discharge she should be able to go to the hospital cafeteria with her dietitian or her family and choose and eat an appropriate meal herself. Once she goes home we expect her to continue to choose healthy foods in healthy amounts.
Most anorexic patients never need to be admitted to the hospital. These patients still need to learn how to eat healthy, though, and support and education from a dietitian is still quite necessary. I depend on dietitians to let me know how much nutrition each of my patients need and how much each one is actually getting. (Yes, some patients occasionally tell us they are eating more than they are actually eating. Ultimately, though, the patient's weight will tell us if she is eating a healthy diet.)
Bulimic patients are managed differently, and often do not have to be put
in the hospital for refeeding. Nutritional education for bulimic patients
is also important, of course, but total nutritional intake is usually not
as much of a problem as with an anorexic patient. The important aspect of
nutritional treatment is to help the patient reduce her bingeing and avoid
purging, and this is very closely intertwined with her
psychologic treatment.
Medical Treatment
An anorexic patient may not have to be hospitalized as long as she is stable medically -- in fact, only about 20% of anorexic patients are ever admitted to the hospital, and we try quite hard to keep our patients out. The medical problems we see most often in our patients are the result of long-term malnutrition, which causes depletion of many important nutrients including
Bulimic patients need to be hospitalized less often than do anorexic patients. We have to watch for (mal)nutrition-related problems in malnourished bulimic patients, of course, but bulimic patients have their own specific problems, usually related to their purging methods. Some but not all of these problems may require hospitalization. They include:
A physician manages medical treatment, including setting weight and nutrition goals, prescribing medication if and when needed, keeping an eye on the patient's physical condition and checking laboratory tests when needed, and treating the medical problems that come along with malnutrition.
Usually, especially if the patient is not so sick that
she needs to be in the hospital, she can be taken care of by her primary
caregiver, who may be a pediatrician, internist, or family practitioner.
Patients with more complex problems, including those who need to be
treated in the hospital, are more often managed by doctors with more
extensive and specific experience in eating disorder management. These
doctors are most often specialists in adolescent medicine (a subspecialty
of pediatrics) or psychiatrists; they may also be pediatric hospitalists
(pediatricians who specialise in caring for hospitalised children). (I
myself am mainly a pediatric hospitalist, although I do a fair amount of
outpatient pediatric practice and teaching as well. My first few years
of experience in eating disorder treatment came through working closely
with adolescent medicine specialists with expertise in eating
disorder management. I now have over a decade of experience in eating
disorder treatment, and although I still work often with my old colleagues
I manage and consult on many patients independently, especially those in
my practice region who are most challenging to manage.)
Psychologic Treatment
Anorexia and other eating disorders are psychologic and social problems as well as medical problems. Therefore, anorexic patients need therapy for themselves, and almost always for their families as well, for the best chance of recovery from their disease.
An anorexic patient who is very malnourished is a particular challenge for the treatment team. As I mentioned above, it's hard to learn when your memory doesn't work properly, and it's hard to remember things without proper nutrition. It is possible to start talking with a malnourished patient about her underlying issues early, but we can't expect her to remember new information until she is better nourished. For this reason we usually have to limit the therapy we give badly-malnourished anorexic patients to supportive counseling, together with simple explanations of anorexia and its effects that can be repeated many times, with occasional variations.
Some years ago I came up with an analogy that I have found useful when explaining nutritional needs to ED patients in the early stages of inpatient treatment -- the “cabin in the Arctic” analogy.
This analogy may be a bit corny (and no -- the food pun was not deliberate...) but it is simple enough for many severely malnourished patients to grasp. I can also extend it as the patient's nutrition -- and with it her ability to remember and think -- improves: for example, I can compare the different nutrients her body needs to different kinds of wood for rebuilding different parts of the cabin and furniture.
Some anorexic patients may be helped with medications. Clinical trials of antidepressants (specifically the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, such as Prozac® -- serotonin is a chemical that the brain uses to transmit signals) have so far shown little or no benefit to patients who are acutely ill because of their malnutrition, but may help prevent relapses later. Anorexia may result from depression (many of us lose our appetites when we're depressed, after all -- some for longer than others), and if this is the case antidepressants may be very helpful.
There are two potential problems with SSRI therapy in anorexia. One is that weight gain has been reported as a side effect with some of the SSRIs This may not be a significant side effect -- we don't depend on it to improve weight and nutrition -- but many anorexics are aware of the side effect, or find out about it when they look up the medication we just prescribed for them, and stop taking the medication without telling anyone about it. The other problem is a severe side effect known as the serotonin syndrome, in which too much serotonin accumulates in the brain, leading to symptoms ranging from restlessness and hyperactivity to disorientation, hyperthermia, high blood pressure, and seizures. (The complete list of signs of serotonin syndrome is rather long.) There are several conditions that can contribute to serotonin syndrome: one is chronic malnutrition as seen in anorexic patients. Because of the risk, many doctors will not give SSRIs to their patients at all until they are relatively close to their target weight range, and watch their patients carefully for signs of the syndrome.
Other medications have not been studied as thoroughly in anorexic patients. Frankly, one reason why is that it's hard to do studies on medication in anorexia, largely because anorexic patients generally avoid anything that they think may make them gain weight. There are some medications that sometimes help with weight recovery in anorexic patients, but the effects of these medicines hasn't been shown to be consistent.
Ultimately, more intensive therapy is needed for both patients and their families. The goals of therapy include persuading patients that anorexia nervosa is a serious disease and not a lifestyle (yes, there are anorexics who claim that their "anorexic lifestyle" is just that), and helping them to deal with their view of their own body and with their diet choices. Therapy also has to include work on other psychologic problems such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, which may be easier to treat but which may also have been behind the development of anorexia. There are several different approaches to therapy, including
CBT has been shown in clinical trials to be effective in treating bulimia. It is also used in treatment of anorexic adults, and may be helpful in treating anorexic teenagers as well, but this hasn't been studied as well as CBT for bulimia. Group therapy is also potentially helpful for anorexic patients, although again this hasn't been studied well in clinical trials.
Anorexic and bulimic patients who continue to relapse in spite of outpatient therapy and repeated hospitalizations may require intensive residential treatment. Most of these programs combine multiple forms of recreational therapy (one well-known program is located on a ranch in the Southwest, and horseback riding is part of the treatment protocol) with intensive individual and group therapy and supervising feeding and nutritional education. Patients usually spend 1-2 months in these programs before returning home to continued outpatient care. On the other hand, patients in these programs usually have better rates of recovery than similar patients have with only outpatient treatment. As you can imagine, this type of treatment program is very expensive, and many insurance companies balk at paying the fees -- which most patients' families cannot afford. Fortunately, more enlightened insurers are beginning to realize that residential treatment for the severely-ill anorexic patient is cheaper in the long run than repeated hospitalizations for the medical complications.