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- Eating disorders are serious disorders with life-threatening physical and psychological complications.
- EDs can affect boys and men; children, adolescents and adults; people from all ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds; and people with a variety of body shapes, weights and sizes.
- Weight is not the only clinical marker of an ED. People who are at normal weight can have EDs.
- It is important to remember that EDs do not only affect females at low weight. All instances of precipitous weight loss in otherwise healthy individuals should be investigated for the possibility of an ED, including post-bariatric surgery patients. In addition, rapid weight gain or weight fluctuations can be a potential marker of an ED.
- Individuals at weights above their natural weight range may not be getting proper nutrition and patients within their natural weight range may be engaging in unhealthy weight control practices.
- In children and adolescents, failure to gain expected weight or height, and/or delayed/interrupted pubertal development, should be investigated for the possibility of an ED.
- The medical consequences of EDs can go unrecognized, even by experienced clinicians.
- Eating disorders (including BED) can be associated with serious medical complications. Eating disorders can be associated with significant compromise in every organ system of the body, including the cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, endocrine, dermatological, hematological, skeletal, and central nervous system.
- Early intervention can help minimize the potentially life long complications of this disorder, and can reduce the severity of this life long battle
- Without treatment—and most patients are not being treated– one-fifth of patients will die prematurely.
- Even with treatment, after 8 to 25 years, the premature mortality rates are 4% for AN patients, 3.9% for bulimia nervosa (BN) patients and 5.2% for those with eating disorders not otherwise specified, or EDNOS.
- Anorexia nervosa has the highest premature fatality rate of any mental illness (Sullivan, 1995).