Eating disorders
Mental health
Professor Francesca Solmi is developing novel measures and hypotheses for eating disorders and what causes them. She will use inter-disciplinary collaborations to achieve this.
Eating disorders are severe mental health disorders that tend to start in childhood and adolescence. Around 6% of women and 2% of men experience anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder, or other specified feeding and eating disorders. Despite this, our overall understanding of the prevalence of eating disorders in the population—and the underlying causes—remains limited.
Professor Francesca Solmi from UCL will investigate this further. Her project is made up of three work packages:
(1) The project team will work to improve availability of eating disorder data to facilitate future research. They will create a short eating disorder questionnaire for inclusion in the Age of Wonder Cohort - a large general population study of 30,000 adolescents. The team will also create a short questionnaire for ARFID, pica, and rumination disorder. Their aim is to link population studies to clinical data to better understand how many people have received an eating disorder diagnosis, and the long-term outcomes of people who are not yet diagnosed.
(2) More young people experience eating disorders now than 20 years ago. This could be, in part, due to societal changes - including aspects of urban environments. There is evidence that a lack of parks, higher pollution levels, deprivation, and increased fast-food availability are all linked with worsening mental and physical health in young people. Social media is similarly thought to have increased the rate of eating disorders in young people - but there is no strong evidence of this. The project team aim to explore the content and social media types that may cause eating disorder symptoms, which could help to identify at-risk adolescents and put measures in place to reduce these risks. The team will develop new approaches to study these societal risk factors.
(3) The team will lastly explore the impact of school environments on eating disorder rates. They aim to better understand the aspects of school culture that could contribute to symptoms and identify possible preventative interventions. They will develop a network of interdisciplinary researchers to explore young people's mental health and school environments, who will work alongside young people, parents and teachers to identify risk factors. The network will also be used to explore new measures and datasets that could help support new research in this area.