According to a recent study in the British Journal of Psychiatry, more than two and a half times as many children under the age of 10 have anorexia nervosa.
Early onset eating disorders, eating disorders starting before 13 years of age, represent a significant clinical burden on pediatric and mental health services. Dr. Dasha Nicholls, a consultant child psychiatrist at the University College of London, suggests that general practitioners have difficulty recognizing eating disorders in children.
Most of the 208 patients in Nicholl’s study were girls, but boys accounted for one in five cases. The study concluded that more than 80% of the children in the study had an anorexia-like illness: 37% had diagnosable symptoms, while 43% were classified as having an “unspecified eating disorder.” An additional one in five children had symptoms of disordered eating, such as food avoidance and being underweight.
The new study has galvanized concern that society’s obsession with physical appearance is making children become more body conscious at an increasingly early age. Blame has been placed on everything ranging from poor parenting to the media and websites such as Facebook.
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