Bulimia and anorexia: Myths and Realities

Anorexia and bulimia are, along with obesity, the most renowned eating disorders. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that all three are located at the top of the sad list of the most common disorders of adolescence, continues rodeo doles a circle of silence, ignorance and myths.

Anorexia and bulimia are two conditions for a relatively new name but long history. The medical texts define the disorder anorexia nervous as a food in which the affected person refuses to eat and their weight decreases to seriously compromise health. In almost 90% of cases, the patients are women between 10 and 29 years, and although there are few epidemiological studies, experts estimate that affects about 1 percent of the population.

One particular detail of this disease is that the anorexic is perceived-but-fat weight is far below for your body frame. Also, have been discovered cases of anorexia in all cultures of the world, not just in countries of the Western Hemisphere.

For his part, bulimia is a disorder in which the victim is given anthraces food and then causes vomiting, laxatives or diuretics is administered and makes strenuous physical exercises to-purge-your come lone. According to data from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) of the United States, between 2 and 3 per cent of teenage women have bulimia and the physical consequences can be severe.

Although there are no statistics to mark an increase in the incidence of anorexia, it is an increase of cases of bulimia. Moreover, these figures are only variables. Is that expert having reason to assert that the number of cases of these disorders is often under-reported? For example, a work in the University Hospital in the city of Cordoba revealed that about 23 percent of college students suffer from some type of food.

Widespread disruption
Despite that have become popular-and-disorders increasingly diagnosed in the last fifteen years, the fact is that - diving in descriptions and anecdotes dating from medieval times, you can find stories about mysterious diseases that are characterized by high weight loss, and were caused by a fierce-and self-starvation diet.

Until recently, most of the medical community considered the typical home psychiatric disorders, generated mainly by cultural and social factors. But this idea has, according to the specialists who speak at the conference in Cordoba, much of myth. There is very little medical evidence to show that anorexia and bulimia are disorders caused exclusively by cultural pressures, said Dr. Frances Conner, chief of residents of the Psychiatric Unit at the Maudsley and Bethlehem Hospitals in London. Something similar claims Dr. Oscar Meehan, director of the psychiatric clinic and Mira Lopez and a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, when he says: “currently it is thought that anorexia and bulimia nervous have a concurrent origin: on the one hand have a genetic component hereditary and are undoubtedly linked to the process of neural development that takes place during the first months of life of the newborn Molded by the stimuli it receives from its mother. This explains that if a pair of binoculars in one of the sisters has an eating disorder, the risk that the other suffers a similar condition is increased by 60 percent.

On the other hand, some research on the neuron doctrine systems of patients with bulimia and anorexia revealed low levels of the neurotransmitter known as serotonin and high concentrations of cortical, a hormone-linked to the body’s response to stress.

In other words, these are disorders that show the deep interaction between genetic factors, environment where an individual is born and the social environment in which the personality.