NEW YORK CITY — Psychiatric comorbidities are highly prevalent in patients with eating disorders (EDs), a large study showed.
In a propensity-matched cohort of young adults with and without EDs, a wide variety of psychiatric disorders including depression and anxiety, as well as cannabis and alcohol use disorders, were more common in those with EDs, investigators found.
Comorbid psychiatric disorders should be “top of mind when working with someone with an eating disorder. If you are able to treat the comorbid psychiatric conditions, they might have a better recovery from the eating disorder,” study investigator Angela Liu, MD, with Northwell Health at Zucker Hillside Hospital, Glen Oaks, New York, told Medscape Medical News.
The findings were presented on May 5 at the American Psychiatric Association (APA) 2024 Annual Meeting.
Data Gap
As previously reported by Medscape Medical News, more than one in five children worldwide are at a risk for an ED and US medical admissions for adolescents with restrictive EDs more than doubled during the pandemic.
Yet there remains a “gap in the literature” about the prevalence of comorbid psychiatric conditions in people with EDs, specifically in young people, Liu explained.
“To our knowledge, this is the first study using a real-world, multistate administrative dataset to estimate the prevalence of psychiatric comorbidities in young people diagnosed with an eating disorder,” Liu said.
Using the TriNetX database, the researchers identified through ICD-10 codes 14,524 individuals with EDs (mean age, 15.9 years; 79% women) and 110,051 without EDs who were receiving antidepressants (mean age, 17.8 years; 65% women).
“There was a much higher prevalence of almost all other psychiatric conditions in those with an eating disorder compared to the general psychiatry population,” coinvestigator Binx Y. Lin, MD, MSc, with Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine in Roanoke, Virginia, told Medscape Medical News.
In the baseline comparison (before matching), psychiatric disorders seen more often in adults with than in those without EDs included (but were not limited to) mood disorders (51% vs 23%), generalized anxiety disorder (GAD; 30% vs 8%), posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD; 10% vs 2%), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD; 8% vs 1%), panic disorder (6% vs 2%), substance use disorder (8% vs 5%), and adjustment disorders (5% vs 2%).
The results held after propensity score matching, with numerous psychiatric conditions significantly (P < .001) more prevalent in the ED cohort.
| Table. Adjusted Odds Ratio of Psychiatric Comorbidities With EDs | ||
| Comorbid disorder | aOR | 95% CI |
| Mood disorders | 1.20 | 1.14-1.26 |
| GAD | 1.28 | 1.21-1.35 |
| OCD | 1.53 | 1.38-1.70 |
| Panic disorder | 1.63 | 1.45-1.84 |
| Specific phobia | 1.45 | 1.31-1.60 |
| PTSD | 1.29 | 1.18-1.40 |
| Adjustment disorder | 1.36 | 1.20-1.54 |
| Personality disorders | 1.76 | 1.53-2.04 |
| Borderline personality disorder | 1.90 | 1.61-2.23 |
| Substance use disorder | 1.25 | 1.14-1.37 |
| Cannabis use disorder | 1.40 | 1.23-1.58 |
| Alcohol use disorder | 1.61 | 1.32-1.98 |
| aOR = adjusted odds ratio | ||
Understanding the burden of comorbid psychiatric disorders in young people with EDs is important to design comprehensive, evidence-based interventions, the researchers said.
Providing perspective on this topic, Petros Levounis, MD, professor and chair, Department of Psychiatry, Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, Newark, New Jersey, noted that “comorbidity between substance use disorders and other psychiatric disorders has both been grossly underestimated and grossly overestimated.”
“I go around the country and see rehab programs, and there are people that very strongly believe that if you stop using the drugs, you won’t have problems with depression or anxiety or whatever,” Levounis, immediate past president of the APA, shared with Medscape Medical News.
“Others say they have never seen somebody who’s addicted to something that doesn’t also have some other psychiatric disorders and if you just scratch the surface, you always find some other psychological psychiatric problem lying behind. Neither of them are true,” he cautioned.
Levounis said it’s important to recognize that “some people with addiction will also have another psychiatric disorder. But clearly there are people who just have a mental illness without addiction, and there are clearly people who will just have addiction without other mental illness.”
This research had no commercial funding and was supported in part by the American Psychiatric Association Research Fellowship. Liu, Lin, and Levounis had no relevant disclosures.