Eating disorders
Mental health
Dr Zuo Zhang from King’s College London is aiming to better understand the risk factors, causes, and interconnections between eating disorders, using machine learning.
Machine learning uses algorithms to look at lots of different factors at once and pick out the ones that best predict a given behaviour or disorder – in this instance, eating disorders.
Dr Zuo Zhang will interrogate large sets of data, from more than 2,000 adolescents, to identify risk factors and common characteristics of eating disorders, including measures of the brain, personalities, environment and genetics. He will then examine how accurately the risk factors can predict future symptoms, as well as investigating how the risk factors and symptoms interact with one another. This project hopes to uncover some of the causes of eating disorders, in order to help detect people at risk and aid earlier intervention.
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Support usMental health - eating disorders and self-harm
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Why is there a need to fund new research?
In 2017 we identified eating disorders and self-harm as an area of mental health where we could make a real difference. These are devastating conditions which blight the lives of increasing numbers of young people and their families.
Around 1.2 million people in the UK have an eating disorder. Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder, and other eating disorders such as bulimia can lead to severe medical complications.
The UK’s rates of self-harm are among the highest in Europe and have increased steadily over the past decade. Repeated self-harm results in around 150,000 attendances at accident and emergency departments each year and is one of the top five causes of acute medical admission.
Despite the devastating impact of these life-threatening disorders, our understanding of what drives them to develop is still limited.
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