Eating disorders: Family-based therapy can achieve an 80 per cent recovery rate for adolescents with anorexia nervosa, according to a leading US expert on eating disorders.
The success rate is a substantially higher rate compared with traditional treatments which often include a long hospital stay, Prof James Lock of Stanford University, California, told an Irish audience last week.
He was in Dublin to address a conference at the Mater Hospital and to give a training course on family-based therapy (FBT) at the Lucena Clinic in Rathgar.
"On a proportional basis, while it is not as common as major depression or much other psychiatric diagnosis such as schizophrenia, the percentage of patients that die from anorexia is the highest with a reported 15 per cent mortality rate," Prof Lock said.
Family involvement is the corner stone of FBT. It is more typical for parents, who become paralysed with fear at the sight of their child starving themselves, to leave the anorexic to call for help, than to intervene, he said. "Anorexia is an insidious killer if left too long. Parents should intervene immediately they sense something is not right with their son or daughter."
The FBT programme teaches families how to manage symptoms without placing the focus directly on the sufferer or presumed pathological features of the family. Parents are made acutely aware of the importance of their commitment and support, and that they can and must take up the task of "re-feeding" their child, he said.
Prof Fiona McNicholas from Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children, Crumlin, said: "FBT is a very exciting development. Because the treatment is manualised, it means people can be trained to follow through on something shown to be effective.
"FBT doesn't remove the fact that some children will need hospitalisation where medical stabilisation is necessary. " she said.
Prof Lock was in Ireland to help train a core group, which meant therapists and clinicians could now start using this approach, she said.