Prevalence of Eating Disorders and Alexithymia among a sample of Egyptian Medical Students not Attending Psychiatric Clinics

Abstract

Eating disorders are serious illnesses that are associated with severe medical complications and have significant psychiatric comorbidity that could be life-threatening. They also affect the quality of life (Hay & Mondm, 2005; Stice et al 2009). Eating disorders include anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorders, rumination disorders, avoidant/restrictive food intake disorders, and night-eating syndrome (Johnson, 2003, Klump et al., 2009). The newly added diagnostic category to the DSM-5 and ICD 11 guidelines, Binge Eating Disorder (BED), is more prevalent than both anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN) combined (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Besides, DSM-5 newly defines a lower-threshold form of BED, also associated with significant distress or impairment in life functioning: BED of low frequency and/or limited duration can be diagnosed if objective binge eating is occurring less than once per week and/or for shorter than 3 months, while all other DSM-5 criteria Of BED still need to be met (Hilbert, 2019). Binge eating disorder (BED) is probably under-recognized, and in young people may look more like loss of control over eating than true bingeing (Ben Lewis et al., 2016). As compared to the Western countries, the prevalence of EDs in non-Western countries was lower but seemed to be increasing (Makino et al., 2005). Of 306 physical and mental disorders, anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa combined ranked as the 12th leading cause of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) in females aged 15–19years in high-income countries, responsible for 2.2% of all DALYs (Erskinem, 2016)., Keski-Rahkonen and Mustelin state that a basic requirement for advances in the detection and treatment of eating disorders is a better understanding of their epidemiology (Keski-Rahkonen et al., 2016).