Personality Pathology and Cerebral Processing in Eating Disorders

Summary

The proposed study will investigate whether, on the basis of personality traits and personality disorders as well as specific cerebral activation patterns shows differences in adolescent female with anorexia nervosa (AN), bulimia nervosa (BN) and a healthy control group.

Conditions

• Eating Disorders

Interventions

OTHER

SCID-I

The structured clinical interview for DSM-IV Axis I Disorder (SCID-I, German translation, see Wittchen, Zaudig \& Fydrich, 1997) is a semi-structured interview to diagnose AN and BM. It allows a detailed assessment of ED symptoms across different settings and time periods necessary to make an accurate diagnosis.

OTHER

EAT

The Eating Attitudes Test (EAT) is a standardized questionnaire of symptoms and concerns related to ED (Garner \& Garfield, 1979, German translation by Steinhausen). The questionnaire consists of 40 items on a six-point Likert scale, providing information

OTHER

EDI-2

The Eating Disorder Inventory 2 (Paul \& Thiel, 2004) is a self-report questionnaire on psychological features generally associated with AN and BN.The instrument consists of 91 items on a six-point Likert scale. The 11 scales are drive for thinness, bulimia, body dissatisfaction, ineffectiveness, perfectionism, interpersonal distrust, interoceptive awareness, maturity fears, asceticism (provisional), impulse regulation (provisional) and social insecurity (provisional). It was designed as a diagnostic aid; its psychometrics have been tested, with studies demonstrating satisfactory internal consistency reliability coefficients (between .44 and .93), test-retest reliability of .79 to .95 (after one week) and above .80 (after three weeks), and content, convergent and discriminant validity.

OTHER

SCID-II

The SCID-II interview (German, see Wittchen, Zaudig \& Fydrich, 1997) is a widely used and researched instrument to assess DSM-IV-TR personality disorders.The interview covers all ten DSM-IV personality disorders (antisocial, avoidant, borderline, dependent, histrionic, narcissistic, obsessive-compulsive, paranoid, schizoid and schizotypal), PD not otherwise specified, and appendix categories (depressive PD and passive-aggressive PD) and is used to make personality disorder diagnoses either dimensionally or categorically (present-absent). Furthermore, it allows the investigation of patterns of PD that co-occur with other mental disorders as well as the analysis of the underlying structure of personality pathology.

OTHER

LoPF

In order to specifically focus on certain personality traits, we use the LoPF as an additional measure. It is a well-validated and reliable self-report questionnaire to measure healthy and pathological personality functioning in adolescents. It is based on the DSM-5 Section III Alternative Model for Personality disorders and covers core impairments in adolescents' personality functioning: identity, self-direction (self-related personality functioning), intimacy/ attachment and empathy/ social-related personality functioning (Sevecke \& Krischer, 2011).

OTHER

HAWIK-IV

The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (HAWIK-IV, Petermann \& Petermann, 2008) will be used assess intelligence. For adolescents older than 16.11 years, we will use the German version of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (HAWIE-IV).Results from test-retest reliability demonstrate that the mean retest scores for all subtests are higher than the mean test scores from first administration, with effect sizes ranging from .08 (comprehension) to .60 (picture completion). The test has demonstrated an acceptable relationship to other measures of achievement, memory, adaptive behavior, emotional intelligence and giftedness in children and adolescents (Canivez, 2014). For the non-clinical adolescent sample, we will use two subtests of the HAWIK.

DEVICE

fMRI

To measure food-related brain activation, event-related fMRI will be used, with phases of high-caloric images alternating with phases of low-caloric images and images of fixation cross (not related to food images). A total of 18 blocks will be performed - see figure below. The duration of each phase will be 30 seconds. In a second run, the patients and control subjects will drink chocolate milk and water, alternating every 30 seconds, through a long silicon tube. This procedure was successfully tested in a previous fMRI study with adult AN patients (Gizewski et al. 2010, Vocks et al. 2011) and has now been adopted in preliminary measurements for young AN patients.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Medical University Innsbruck

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Kathrin Seveke, Univ-Prof.Dr · Head of department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

Eligibility

Min Age

14 Years

Max Age

18 Years

Sex

FEMALE

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2015-01-31

Primary Completion

2018-11-30

Completion

2018-11-30

Countries

• Austria

Study Locations