Milkshakes - An effective treatment for anorexic teens

New York, April 5:A diet rich in high calorie chocolate milkshake or macaroni and cheese can be an effective treatment for teenagers suffering from anorexia nervosa, a potentially life threatening eating disorder that leads to decreased sensation of appetite.

Anorexia nervosa is classified as a psychophysiological disorder that usually occurs in young women and is characterized by an abnormal fear of becoming obese, a distorted self-image, a persistent unwillingness to eat, and severe weight loss. It is often accompanied by self-induced vomiting, excessive exercise, malnutrition, amenorrhea, and other physiological changes.

Feeding the Anorexic children high-calorie meals until they regain weight could be one approach to treating anorexia nervosa, a condition that goes beyond dieting.

"Anorexia is a life-threatening condition. Treating it early is very important since it is during the teenage years that this disorder usually takes hold," says Dr. Katherine Halmi, founder of the Eating Disorders Program at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Westchester Division and professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. "Traditionally, patients with anorexia have been treated in a hospital setting or through one-on-one outpatient therapy. While inpatient treatment is still appropriate in acute cases, we have increasingly seen the value of family-oriented outpatient therapy for adolescents."

Known as Behavioral Family Therapy, or the Maudsley Approach, this treatment under the behavioural family therapy (BFT) approach for the first time is being compared with a well established treatment known as family systems therapy (FST).

Weill Cornell Medical College researchers, who compared the Maudsley Approach and FST as part of an ongoing study involving 240 adolescents aged 12 to 18 at the New York Presbyterian Hospital Westchester Division and five other centers in the United States, claim the Maudsley's Approach or BFT is more effective than FST.

Although both the therapeutic approaches involve the families of the anorexic patients, but in Maudsley Approach, therapists mainly focus on anorexic patients’ weight gain and ask parents to supervise the eating habits of their anorexic child. Family members feed their kids high-calorie meals until they regain a healthy weight.

In FST too the anorexic teenager attends therapy sessions together with their parents and siblings but the discussions focus on examining various underlying issues in the family, not on eating.

"In Maudsley, food is medicine that restores the body and mind. When the body is starving, the mind also weakens, becoming more susceptible to anorexia's rigid, often obsessive logic. Supervised feeding helps to break this vicious cycle. With the anorexia in charge, the adolescent really cannot regain the weight on his or her own. Nutritional rehabilitation gives the brain the nutrition it needs to re-establish healthy eating habits," says Dr. Dara Bellace, a clinical psychologist at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Westchester Division and an instructor of psychology in psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College.

The Maudsley Approach, named after the hospital in London where it was developed in the 1980s, has previously shown promise in successfully preventing hospitalization and helping adolescents recover their normal weights. At least 75 percent of patients on this therapy even maintained their recovery after five years.