LONDON - Eating disorder specialists have reacted with caution to research suggesting that some children with anorexia have abnormal blood flow to parts of their brain.
The idea that a physical defect, rather than cultural or genetic factors, can predispose people to eating disorders is controversial. Most specialists admit that the basic causes of the conditions are not known.
Researchers at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, London, will tell an international conference on eating disorders this week that some children seem to be biologically vulnerable to anorexia.
Consultant psychiatrist, Dr Bryan Lask, psychologist, Dr Rachel Bryant Waugh, and radiologist, Dr Isky Gordon, found a reduced blood flow to the anterior temporal lobe of the brain - which regulates appetite - in 16 of 18 children with anorexia, aged eight to 16. On average the blood flow was 10 per cent less than normal, but in some children it was up to 30 per cent less.
The researchers are themselves cautious about the findings. The abnormality could have been a result of the starvation, rather than the cause of it, although Dr Lask said scans a year later of three girls who had recovered still showed the abnormality.
Estimates suggest one in 100 girls and young women has anorexia, with the total in Britain in put at around 70,000. Ms Janet Treasure, consultant in the eating disorders unit at the Institute of Psychiatry, London, said the study was "another piece in the jigsaw puzzle, but it is going too far to say this is the cause".