Outcome of anorexia nervosa related to treatment utilizing an adolescent medicine approach

The scientific literature suggests that outcome for adolescents with eating disorders bears little relation to the type of treatment used. Practitioners of adolescent medicine care for adolescents with eating disorders and have reported outcome in three studies, to which a fourth is added in this paper. This new sample of 34 adolescents represents consecutive admissions to an inpatient adolescent medicine unit who were then followed as outpatients by the same interdisciplinary treatment team. An average of more than 5 years after hospitalization, the group had a mean weight of 97.9% of normal and 94% were menstruating (87.5% regularly). Depending on the outcome criteria used, between one-half and two-thirds of the subjects had an excellent to good outcome, with only about 10% of subjects symptomatic at follow-up. Comparing the most recent cohort of 34 adolescents (Group II) with the older cohort of 49 subjects (Group I) reveals a trend toward behaviors associated with bulimia more commonly on entering treatment. These encouraging results suggest that adolescent medicine may offer a complementary approach to traditional methods for adolescents with eating disorders.Received M.D. from Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia, PA. Research interests are in bone mineral density in females with anorexia nervosa.Received M.D. from the University of Buffalo School of Medicine in Buffalo, NY. Research interests include examination of the relationship of violence and illicit substance use in adolescents and the relationship of physical abuse and bulimia nervosa.