Adelaide study questions treatment

The Flinders Medical Centre in Adelaide followed the progress of 220 women with eating disorders over a five-year period. It found that 25% with anorexia and 50% with bulimia sought no treatment for their illnesses. But, more alarmingly, it found the condition of those who did seek treatment did not differ greatly from those who did not seek treatment after five years.

Researchers also found that after five years only a third of women with anorexia nervosa had made a complete recovery. The principal researcher, Mr David Ben-Tovim, said the study proved that not enough was known about eating disorders for effective treatments to be devised and that all the current evidence proved that the scientific basis for treatment, including resource-intensive hospital admissions, was weak." For eating disorders, as for many other long-term illnesses, care rather than cure may be the appropriate aim," he said.

"Even if women [in the study] did seek specialised treatment, we were not able to prove that those people were any more likely to recover than the people who sought no treatment. That left us with a question mark but no answer, and that is very disconcerting because it reinforces the fact that there is no definitive treatment," Professor Ben-Tovim said. A spokeswoman for the Eating Disorders Foundation, Ms Karen Elford, said further research was needed to make treatments more effective. She said such ambiguous results "could lead to a simplistic view about the value of treatment".