The Changing Face of Anorexia

(WebMD)  Think anorexia is a teen disease, or a habit taken up by spoiled, white rich girls? Think again.

White women in their teens and 20s still account for most anorexia cases in the U.S. But experts say women in their 40s and 50s, men, black and Hispanic women, and even little girls as young as 8 or 9 years old are showing up in doctors' offices with anorexia, bulimia, and other eating disorders.

These folks are hardly the typical profile dating from the 1980s, when movies like The Best Little Girl in the World portrayed the distorted body image and birdlike eating habits of well-off white teenagers and young women in their 20s. Research, too, focused primarily on this group of patients.

Now, experts wonder, what's going on? Are eating disorders on the rise in these populations

or are we finally seeing what's been there all along?

It's a little of both, suggests Diane Mickley, MD, co-president of the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA, www.nationaleatingdisorders.org) and the founder and director of the Wilkins Center for Eating Disorders in Greenwich, Conn.

"I've done intakes at our center for 25 years, and there's no question that our patients are getting older, and we have many more middle-aged patients," she says. "Now, this is an illness that starts in adolescence, which burgeoned in the 1970s and 1980s. The majority of patients get better, but some do not, and they get older."

Few of these cases indicate a truly new onset of the disease at age 35 or 45. "Instead, it's the resurgence of a disease that they may have had since adolescence. We do see the occasional patient with middle-aged onset of anorexia, but the increase in older patients coming for care is predominantly among those who've had it for a long time," says Mickley.

Nevertheless, many of these women are seeking care for the first time in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. Why now?

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