The Changing Face of Anorexia

Victims Of Anorexia Are Getting Older, Younger, And More Diverse

(WebMD) 
"African-American women have been found in some research to have higher levels of laxative abuse for weight control even than white women, which was surprising," says Gayle Brooks, PhD, vice president and clinical director of the Renfrew Center in Florida. "We see high levels of diuretic use as well." Young black women, in short, are more likely to be "bingeing and purging" than they are to be starving themselves with anorexic behavior.

That, too, may be changing. African-American women do get anorexia. A 2001 study, for example, found that 2 percent of African-American women at a large Midwestern university had the disorder. Kaelyn Carson, a 20-year-old college cheerleader and track star from Michigan, died in the summer of 2001 after a 14-month battle with anorexia.

"Whatever sort of protective function comes from being very culturally connected dissipates over time as pressures rise on women of color, as they do white women, to have their self-esteem determined by body size," says Brooks.

She adds, "the protective qualities of culture become much less influential when a young girl goes into a predominantly white environment, where she's assaulted with images and pressure to look a certain way."

Anorexia: Not Just A Woman's Problem

In the mid-1980s, experts believed that women with anorexia outnumbered men by a factor of 10 to one or more. But in 2001, a Canadian study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry found that female anorexics outnumbered males by only four to one.