Eating disorders

Eating disorders are serious, complex conditions influenced by a blend of genetic, metabolic and other biological, psychological, and environmental factors.

At present, services across the UK are facing unprecedented demand, with effective interventions hampered by insufficient resources, fragmented services and variable care pathways. People with eating disorders, families, and clinicians alike all agree on the critical need to improve care pathways and treatment, to ensure better patient outcomes.

Led by Professor Gerome Breen from King's College London and Dr Karina Allen from South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, this project is working to establish a UK-wide NHS research network spanning child and adult eating disorder services - the Eating Disorders Clinical Research Network (EDCRN).

The EDCRN team aim to strengthen research into eating disorders, to improve understanding of the factors influencing development and maintenance of the condition, and help develop more person-centred treatments.

Through this network, the team will be able to gain deeper insight into patients who are being seen by UK eating disorder services, how current treatments work for different groups, and the best ways to conduct eating disorder research. Together with people with lived experience, the EDCRN have agreed upon a core dataset to record eating disorder symptoms, treatments, outcomes, demographics, risk factors, and physical health markers. This dataset is now being collected in participating services across the UK.

By collecting this data, services can help to advance understanding of how EDs present, treatments and outcomes, and promote further research into the contributing risk-factors. The team hope this will, in turn, lead to more effective and individualised treatments.

The project will help to address fragmentation and facilitate new and exciting research collaborations. The data gathered through this project will be open to all researchers for data analyses, and the collaborative network will support future clinical trials, experimental medicine, and psychology.