Adolescent's Bulimia Can Be Treated Better With Family's Help

Many teenagers might be affected by bulimia nervosa---a worrying eating disorder in which individuals binge on large quantities of food and then purge them out hoping to get rid of whatever has been consumed. Those who have eaten excessively might force the food out through vomiting or excessive exercise.

One in three US children is said to be affected by bulimia. The new findings were published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

"Parents need to be actively involved in the treatment of kids and teens with eating disorders," researcher Daniel Le Grange of the University of California-San Francisco said, according to scienceworldreport. "This study shows definitively that parental engagement is imperative for a successful outcome of adolescents with bulimia nervosa. It goes counter to the training that physicians receive in psychiatry, which teaches that parents are to blame for bulimia, and therefore should be omitted from treatment."

Scientists took the study and compared two treatments that included cognitive behavioral therapy and family based therapy. Even as the former treatment concentrated on an individual patient, that helped them to gain total understanding of themselves as well as their thoughts making them "binge and purge", family based therapy tried to help parents become aware of it so that they could help their children.

So the participant groups had 130 randomized adolescents who were aged 12 to 18 with bulimia receiving cognitive behavioral therapy or family based therapy. They were treated through 18 outpatient sessions for half a year and six to 12 months of follow-up.

Those who were involved in family based therapy managed to achieve greater abstinence rates from binging and purging than others through individual cognitive based therapy. Finally, 39 percent of family based therapy patients could keep away from binging and purging as compared to 20 percent of cognitive based therapy patients, while at the six-month follow-up 44 percent of family based patients were not binging and purging versus 25 percent of patients who were on the receiving end of cognitive based therapy.

"These findings are quite clear," Le Grange concluded. "Family based therapy is the treatment of choice for adolescents with bulimia nervosa, because it works quicker and faster and maintains its impact over time."